2016.33 Where did we go wrong?

Useful, descriptive errors are becoming the industry standard and Perl 6 and Rust languages are leading that effort. The errors must go beyond merely telling you the line number to look at. They should point to a piece of code you wrote. They should make a guess at what you meant. They should be referencing your code, even if they originate in some third party library you’re using.

Check out The Awesome Errors of Perl 6 by Zoffix! (see also the Reddit comments).

Other Blog Posts

• One Liner Tuesday by Aaron Sherman.
• Sneaking Into A Loop by gfldex.
• Source code of split by justrajdeep.
• Sparrowdo automation. Part 5. Managing services and processes. by melezhik.
• Interesting, useful, rarely used idioms by singe.
• A failure, you say? I don’t take exception to that! by Aaron Sherman.
• Dealing With Symbolic Links by nonviolent_blackbelt.
• It’s Lazy All The Way Down by gfldex.

Core Developments

• Timo Paulssen fixed the memory hungriness and catastrophical slowness when trying to match a string with :i, especially on large haystacks.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made several types of usage of .splice at least 10x as fast. She also added another 29 ranges of unicode digit ranges to magic auto-increment / decrement.
• Jonathan Worthington worked on making freeing of resources (such as a network port) more asynchronously reliable.
• TimToady fixed many issues related to improper sinking and improper “useless use” warnings.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen also implemented map logic for blocks that are guaranteed to not return a Slip. For instance ^10000 .map: *.Str
  will run 10%+ faster if you specify a return type for the block, e.g. ^10000 .map: -> \x --> Str { x.Str }.
• Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer implemented the :exists adverb on multi-dimensional subscript literals.
• TimToady also fixed a problem with character ranges that would incorrectly match ä with a even when :m (aka ignoremark) was not specified.
• Pawel Murias fixed the --profile feature, which was temporarily broken.
• And as usual many other fixes, additions and other improvements.

Documentation Developments

Mostly housekeeping, gfldex++ tells me:

• Corrections to the documentation of USAGE.
• Also corrections on gather and take.
• New section on role arguments.

Ecosystem Additions

• HTTP::HPACK by Jonathan Worthington.
• Rakudo::Slippy::Semilist by Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer.

Winding Down

Quite some nice blog posts! And some nice fixes and improvements. Can’t wait to see what we will have next week!