2016.27 Summer Starts

With a lot of vacation looming, and many of us celebrating Independence Day (or seeing the Movie of the same title), things appear quiet in the Perl 6 World. Lots of stuff is brewing / simmering though. One of them being the Perl 6 coverage at the YAPC::Europe, which will be held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania from 24 to 26 August. With some extra special Perl 6 Goodies:

• Introducing Perl 6, a 6 hour course of OSCON fame, given by Jeffrey Goff, which is actually happening the day before the conference actually starts.
• How to lie with Benchmarks – Perl 6 Is Faster! by Steve Mynott.
• CSV With Flexible Headers (Perl 5 And Perl 6) by H. Merijn Brand.
• The Non-Butterfly Effect – A Universe Where Camelia Did Not Flap Her Wings by Nicholas Clark.
• Real-World Parsing With Perl 6 by Leon Timmermans.
• Running Perl 6 In A SailfishOS Phone by André Walker.
• Ten Things You Need To Know About Perl 6 by Jeffrey Goff.

Not all of these presentations have been accepted yet, but if you’re logged into Act and you have indicated that you will visit the YAPC::Europe, you can indicate that you want to attend that presentation. This will help the organisers in deciding which presentations to accept!

By the way, if you are logged into Act, you can also indicate your affinity with Perl 6 by adding the perl6.pm Monger Group to Your Information, so you can be found in the Search for Users.

Core Developments

• Jonathan Worthington put in a lot of work in MoarVM, with as a visible result a multi-method lookup cache algorithm that also takes required named parameters into account. This has made things like %h:delete a lot faster (like 18x).
• A lot of work on solving remaining precompilation issues was done by Stefan Seifert and Nick Logan (hope I didn’t forget anybody, as this is becoming more and more a team effort, which is good!).
• Tom Browder has started to sink his teeth into pod parsing!
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made the count-only and bool-only optional methods of an Iterator. This means that if you are writing your own Iterator class, and you can determine the number of elements the iterator will generate without actually generating any values, you can now tell the Sequencer to take a shortcut.
• Error reporting that occurred in an EVALled string, no longer mentions <Unknown file>, which makes error reporting much nicer, specifically in the REPL.
• Zoffix Znet reverted a fix that tried to allow Unicode codepoints with the No property to be acceptable as numeric values in a val(). After discussion with TimToady, it was decided that one should use unival() for those cases instead.
• Many, many smaller and larger optimizations.

Blog Posts

Not too many this week.

• Sparrowdo Sandbox by melezhik.
• 5 Things I learned at YAPC by Kivanc Yazan (especially point 3: “Perl 6 is pretty good”).

Videos

• Full Perl 6 Compatibility In Perl 5.24 by Ricardo Signes.

Ecosystem Additions

More than one per day!

• Shell::Capture by Peter Pentchev.
• Text::Wrap by Jonas Kramer.
• Text::Tabs by Altai-man.
• TinyID by Pawel Pabian.
• DateTime::DST by Sterling Hanenkamp.
• File::Presence by Andy Weidenbaum.
• Operator::defined-alternation by Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer.
• Distribution::Common by Nick Logan.

Winding Down

Well, that’s it for this week again. Hope I’ll find the time for some backlog gem searching again soon. See you next week!