2015.23..25 Catching Up Is Hard To Do

The past weeks we’ve had no Perl 6 weekly. Trying to catch up with so many things happening on-line and IRL is quite a lot of work and prone to omissions. Please bear with us while we get things on track again.

Blog Posts

For those of you who missed them, there were some excellent blog posts in the past 3 weeks (in chronological order):

• Fixing Lots Of Things (by Jonathan Worthington)
• Rakudobrew (by Brian Wisti)
• Studying (by Bart Wiegmans)
• When I Don’t Even Feel Like Using Blame (by Carl Mäsak)
• Porting Some Modules To Perl 6 (by Helmut Wollmersdorfer)
• Concurrency Fixes, Control Exceptions And More (by Jonathan Worthington)
• Adventures In Instruction Encoding (by Bart Wiegmans)

Conferences, Conferences, Conferences

The conference season has really started again. Some Perl 6 related videos from the German Perl Workshop in Dresden:

• Binding C Libraries (by Tobias Leich, auf Deutsch)
• Perl 6 Funktional (by Herbert Breunung, auf Deutsch)

Some Perl 6 related videos from OSDC.no in Oslo, Norway:

• Perl 6: Beyond Dynamic Vs. Static (by Jonathan Worthington)
• Innovating In The Shadows Of Success (by Patrick Michaud)
• Look Ma, No XS! Calling C Libraries From Perl 6 With NativeCall (by Arne Skjærholt)
• Objects ∩ Concurrency (by Jonathan Worthington)

And some Perl 6 related videos from the YAPC::NA in Salt Lake City, Utah:

• A Butterfly’s View Of Perl 6 (by Patrick Michaud, needs a Google account)
• Perl 6 For Mere Mortals (by Curtis Poe)
• Q&A With Larry Wall (with Ricardo Signes)
• Stop Panicking! Perl 6 is just like Perl 5 (where it counts) (by Bruce Gray)
• Everything Old Is New Again – Quaternion In Perl 6 (by Jeff Goff)
• Hack The Community (by Brent Laabs)
• Perl Pigs (by Stephen Scaffidi), specifically at 3:40 into the video

And some related blog posts:

• Breaking The Fourth YAPC (by Buddy Burden)
• YAPC::NA 2015 Wrap-Up (by Joel Berger)

The GLR Is Spreading Its Wings

Patrick Michaud has started a new version of the List And Iteration Synopsis. If you want to keep abreast with the developments there, please check it out. If you have any comments, let them be heard now rather than later!

Rakudo 2015.06 Was Released

Rob Hoelz made the Salt Lake release happen, which came in at 200+ commits. Since then we have seen about 40 commits for the next release, mostly consisting of bug fixes, performance enhancements and the odd new deprecation.

Busy FROGGS

Tobias Leich has been busy. He made:

• Rakudo on MoarVM buildable on Windows with gcc/gmake
• Use run()/shell() as a replacement for pipe()
• Added libffi support, which should let build MoarVM on all platforms

This should make MoarVM build on all Debian platforms except Hurd.

Unicode-8 Support Is Now In

As of 23 June, Rakudo on MoarVM supports Unicode 8.0, only about a week after its release! Appropriately for the Perl 6 Party, it has a code point for Bottle With Popping Cork!

Covariance And Contravariance

A Fresh Look At An Old Issue

Giuseppe Castagna has written an interesting article about (static) typing for Perl 6:

The target reader of (the first part of) the article is every Perl 6 programmer, which is why all the above is explained by examples of Perl 6 code (no formula, theory, theorem, or property whatsoever) and I tried to do my best to make the article completely self-contained…. The second part of the paper targets language implementers and designers.

I haven’t really gotten around to reading it thoroughly, but I find it very interesting that all examples in this article are using Perl 6! Giuseppe is welcoming comments on the per6-language mailing list.

Winding Down

Perhaps this Perl 6 Weekly was a bit too sparse on events on the #perl6 channel. Trying to catch up with 3 weeks of backlog has become such a daunting task, that I have only scanned the first week of June for interesting bits (so far). If there are any other interesting bits in the backlog in weeks 24/25, I will mention them in the weekly of week 26.