2016.42 Release Time

Welcome back! The answer, in case you wondered, is of course 42:
$ perl6 -e 'say "Life, the Universe and Everything".WHY'
42
See WHY for more information.

Releases

Zoffix Znet and his robobuddies released yet another Rakudo Compiler Release: 2016.10. Steve Mynott took it upon himself to create yet another Rakudo Star release (candidate for now) from this compiler release. Please test this release candidate!

Core Developments

A rather quiet week just before the release. The items marked ^* did not make it in this month’s release, so will be found in next month’s release.

• Jonathan Worthington continued his work on the Unicode encoding/decoding re-factor, now allowing for Proc::Async to choose the encodings of the input and output handles. He also fixed a problem with a too eager optimization of .return.
• Zoffix Znet, among many other things, fixed a number of Mix and Bag related coercers.
• Tobias Leich fixed a problem with .roll on MoarVM with values larger than 2**32, which turned out to be a problem in the underlying libtommath, which got fixed upstream^*.

Blog Posts

• Hangman by Ken Youens-Clark.
• Perl6::Parser available for Perl 6 by Jeffrey Goff (Reddit comments).
• Update On Rakudo-js by Paweł Murias.
• Change My View – Perl is a terrible programming language and should never be used for any program longer than a dozen lines when Python is an option by Sohcahtoa82.
• YAPC::EU Recap by Sweth Chandramouli.

Ecosystem Additions

Quite a nice crop this week!

• Perl6::Parser by Jeffrey Goff.
• Unicode::GCB by cygx.
• Log::Async by Brian Duggan.
• CompUnit::DynamicLib by Sterling Hanenkamp.
• Concurrent::Channellify by Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer.

Winding Down

Brought to you from OSCON Europe in London, UK. See you again next week!