2016.38 We Are The Robots

This weekend saw the first fully automated release of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 2016.09. Thanks to Zoffix Znet for teaching the robots how to do this.

Core Developments

Most of the past week’s changes made it into the compiler release!

• Jan-Olof Hendig fixed an issue with adverbs not working on Cool.trans.
• Jonathan Worthington fixed a memory leak involving EVAL and a multi-dispatch cache unbounded growth bug involving calls with many named arguments.
• Daniel Green made sure unicode digits can now be used with Match variables ($١), quote pairs (:۳), negative numbers (-١), and radix bases (:۳("22")).
• Zoffix Znet fixed …, ???, and !!! yadas not working to stub classes. He also fixed an issue with .tree not calling the correct candidate.
• Rob Hoelz fixed tab-completion issues with non-identifiers in the REPL. He also made sure that LEFT/RIGHT DOUBLE PARENTHESIS characters can now be used with q and other quoting constructs.
• Timo Paulssen fixed an issue when NativeCall structures were set up concurrently and an issue in the optimizer with unhandled Failures.
• Stefan Seifert has worked a lot on Inline::Perl5 making some benchmarks about 2x as fast.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made Blob/Buf.reverse about 1.5x as fast, auto-threading (calling a sub with a junction as a parameter) about 10% faster, and List.reverse about 5% faster. She also fixed an issue with .first and junctions.
• And many others smaller fixes, better error messages and optimizations.

Blog Posts

• Perl 6 Core Hacking – Wrong Address; Return To Sender by Zoffix Znet.
• Perl – Language, Community, and the Future by Navrup Johal.
• The Top 10 Things You Need to Know About Perl 6 by Jeffrey Goff.
• Perl6.Fail, Release Robots, and Other Goodies by Zoffix Znet.

Ecosystem Additions

• IRC::Client::Plugin::UserPoints by Julien Simonet.
• Heap by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• FileSystem::Capacity by Ramiro Encinas.
• Data::MessagePack by Pierre Vigier.
• Algorithm::LBFGS by Itsuki Toyota.
• Geo::IP2Location::Lite by Lee Johnson.

Winding Down

That’s it again for this week. Please tune in again next week!