2015.27 It was HOT

Perl 6 Development Fund – Grant Status Update

Jonathan Worthington has written a Grant Status Update in which he lists his major achievements of the grant work so far. Sadly, as it stands now, the end of that grant work is in sight as funds are running out. You can support the Perl 6 Core Development fund yourself (select Perl 6 Development), or convince someone in your organization to have your organization become a major sponsor!

Mogrification in Progress

Jeffrey Goff has taken Perl::Critic and mogrified that into a Perl 5 to Perl 6 Translator. It is a very interesting work in progress, worthy of checking out!

FatRats divide Better

Solomon Foster blogged about a Fun and Easy Fibonacci Trick. FatRats for The Win!

Intermediate Progress on an Intermediate Representation

Bart Wiegmans takes us down into the rabbit hole that is implementing something very much like DynASM. Since that wasn’t part of the original plan at all, Bart thought it justified an explanation.

Using Xapian with Perl 6

Rob Hoelz made an excellent screencast about how he integrated the (C++) Xapian library using NativeCall. One can only hope for more screencasts to come!

AmsterdamX.pm YouTube Channel

Upasana Shukla has announced a YouTube Channel for presentations made at AmsterdamX meetings. Two presentations are of interest for this reader group:

• Parallel Features of Perl 6 (Part 1) (by Andrew Shitov)
• Parallel Features of Perl 6 (Part 2) (also by Andrew Shitov)

The Perl 6 Story

The Perl 6 Story is another of Andrew Shitov‘s projects, with a lot of nice interviews. Some of which have been mentioned here before, and some have not. Most notably not mentioned here before, are interviews with Carl Mäsak, Stevan Little and Flávio Glock.

From the Development Front

• Jonathan Worthington has created the underpinnings to multi-dimensional arrays in MoarVM (which e.g. lets a 3x3x3 int Array exist as a single packed blob in memory). The Perl 6 interface to this functionality should become visible in the coming days.
• Larry Wall tells us he’s been privately prototyping the new non-flattening list and array semantics to see where the new gotchas will be.
• Leon Timmermans unbitrotted Tap::Parser and added a synchronous TAP parser as well!
• Elizabeth Mattijsen added a no worries pragma to surpress those pesky “there could be something wrong here” warnings, mostly intended for programmers migrating from Perl 5. She also added two of these warnings (internally called “worries”) for use of the backslash in a Perl 5 way.

From the 4 week backlog

• smls posted two links to Firefox add-ons that allow you to easily search the Perl 6 Synopses and search the Perl 6 Documentation. It does a Google site search, but the add-on allows you to easily create a shortcut to it in Firefox.
• Nicholas Clark posted a link about how camels are revered in some parts of the world.
• vendethiel mentioned an an interesting paper on recursion vs corecursion. For the aficionado, I think.
• Carl Mäsak disliked the term “flapping tests”: instead he thinks that non-deterministic test is a better description of the phenomenon of tests producing different results in otherwise identical runs.
• Carl Mäsak also suggested some required reading as to why numbering should start at zero. A Flash from the past indeed! 1982 to be precise!
• Several people mentioned WebAssembly as a potential, and exciting, new backend for Rakudo Perl 6. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have picked up on the opportunity just yet.
• Carl Mäsak kept on mentioning interesting things: Zero-Overhead Metaprogramming – Reflection and Metaobject Protocols
  Fast and without Compromises was another one of them, with a discussion on Hacker News.
• Jens Rehsack wondered whether Learn Perl 6 in Y minutes was known on the #perl6 channel. Of course it was! But the nice Perl6 intro by vendethiel is worth mentioning again.
• David Adler has taken it on himself to expand the docs for Perl 5 to Perl 6 Translation. I can only say: more power to him!
• Rob Hoelz recommended Compiler Errors for Humans as a neat read. There is also an associated discussion on Hacker News.

Recent additions to the Ecosystem

In the future, I would like to show the new additions of the past week to the Perl 6 Ecosystem. Since this is the first time, I’ll list them here since the 1st of June:

• App::jsonv (by David Farrell)
• Editsrc::Uggedit (by Uladox)
• Graffiks (by Matt Egeler)
• PriorityQueue (by Rob Hoelz)
• LibraryCheck (by Jonathan Stowe)
• MARPA (by Jeffrey Goff)
• ANTLR4 (by Jeffrey Goff)
• Audio::Sndfile (by Jonathan Stowe)
• AccessorFacade (by Jonathan Stowe)
• Math::Trig (by Jonathan Scott Duff)
• KnottyPair (by Sterling Hanenkamp)
• data::dump (by Tony Odell)
• BufUtils (by Anthony Parsons)
• App::p6tags – editor tag Generator (by Steve Mynott)
• Hiker – PP6 MVC For The Masses (by Tony Odell)
• CheckSocket (by Jonathan Stowe)
• ArrayHash (by Sterling Hanenkamp)
• Audio::Libshout (by Jonathan Stowe)

Winding Down

That’s it for this record-breaking hot week (at least in this part of the world). Hope everybody will keep their cool in the next one!