2016.29 The Zoffix Has Landed

The past week we could welcome a new Rakudo core member with a commit bit: Zoffix Znet. In the past months, Zoffix has already been quite busy with many blog posts, work on the RT Queue and even do all the work for a Rakudo Compiler release. This week, Zoffix not only did one Rakudo compiler release (2016.07), Zoffix even did a a second one: 2016.07.1, quickly after a serious blocker for Rakudo Star was discovered! I’m told a Rakudo Star release will now be available soon, based on this last compiler release.

Larry Wall Interview

A little while ago, Slashdot asked users to send in questions to Larry Wall. And Larry now has answered most of the serious questions! And some not so serious questions 🙂

Perl6::Tidy

Jeffrey Goff has started the Perl6::Tidy project. From its description:

Perl 6’s grammar is now pretty much fleshed out, but it’s hard to get at from within. This makes tools like code formatters, coverage and analysis tools hard to put together. This module aims to fix that.

I can only wish that he gets many supporters! Also check out the Reddit comments.

Core Developments

• Stefan Seifert fixed a bug in recording dependencies of precomp files, which would make complex dependencies (such as with XML::LibXML) load much faster, both in production as well as in development.
• vlmarek contributed a patch so that when interfacing with NativeCall, one can now specify sub names not to be mangled, by specifying is mangled(False).
• Several methods on Str are now much faster: .samemark (50x), .contains (6x), .substr-eq (4x) and many more with smaller efficiency improvements.
• for loops / maps that take 2 parameters (e.g. for %h.kv -> $key, $value { }) are now 4x faster.
• Many List/Array related functionality has been made more efficient (both in CPU, as well as in memory usage).
• And many other fixes and improvements, about 80 commits in all.

Documentation Developments

In this section I will try to follow developments on the documentation effort. Thanks gfldex for making this reporting easier for me!

• Three more traps to avoid added.
• Some layout improvements.
• A Debug button at the bottom for those want to help improve the docs.
• Some additions to the 5to6 Section.
• Unspace is now documented.
• Builtin classes Mu, Any, Num and Cool have many more methods documented now.
• A few broken Code examples were fixed.
• Filename mangling allows other platforms than *nix to host a private copy of docs.perl6.org.
• And many more small changes and additions.

Blog Posts

Quite a couple of blog posts this week, some of them even multi-part!.

• Simple String Parsing by Aaron Sherman.
• A Date With The Bug Queue or Let Me Help You Help Me Help You (Part 1) and (Part 2) by Zoffix Znet.
• Sparrowdo Automation (Part 1), (Part 2), and (Part 3) by melezhik.
• I Don’t Need Conditionals Either by gfldex.
• Disecting Subsets by gfldex.
• Adding Profiling Support To nqp-js by Paweł Murias.

Ecosystem Additions

• RT::REST::Client by Zoffix Znet.
• Uzu by Sam Morrison.
• Semaphore::ReadersWriters by Marcel Timmerman.

Winding Down

It’s been a busy and hot week. Looking forward to even more goodies to come. And apologies for the things I forgot to mention this week. Please make sure I won’t forget them next week! 🙂