2016.50 Highlighting & ProfileSQL

Samantha McVey has been working on Perl 6 syntax highlighting for the Atom editor. First of all, it is now a perl6org github project. Secondly, the Atom Perl 6 Syntax Highlighter Plugin’s download location has moved.

Daniel Green tells me yours truly failed to mention the possibility of profiling a piece of code, and having the output appear in SQL that can be queried later. Simply specify a filename with an .sql extension in the --profile-filename= parameter when running the code you want to --profile.

Adventing Along

Every day a new Perl 6 advent post!

• Day 6 – Perl 6 Books — the Time is Ripe by Moritz Lenz.
• Day 7 — Set In Your Ways: Perl 6’s Setty and Baggy Types by Zoffix Znet (Hacker News and Reddit comments).
• Day 8 — How to Make, Use, and Abuse Perl 6 Subsets by Zoffix Znet (Reddit comments here and here).
• Day 9 – A preview of the ‘hackable’ JIT compiler by Bart Wiegmans (Reddit comments).
• Day 10 — Let’s learn and try double-ended priority queue with Perl 6 by Itsuki Toyota.
• Day 11 — Perl 6 Core Hacking – It Slipped Through The QASTs by Zoffix Znet.
• Day 12-Avoiding User Namespace Pollution with Perl 6 Modules by Tom Browder (Reddit comments).

And for our Japanese friends, Itsuki Toyota has been organizing a Japanese language counterpart.

Learning Perl 6 Kickstarter

The funding goal of the Learning Perl 6 Kickstarter has been reached! And that’s even without the TPF Grant Proposal! brian d foy is still looking for more backers, even at $1 a piece, to gauge the support in the community. So, if you just want to let him know you think the book is a good idea, please pledge just the one dollar to increase the number of backers!

Meanwhile, brian has continued his Quick Tips:

• Quick Tip #21: The rats in the machine
• Quick Tip #22: Use Perl 5 modules in Perl 6
• Quick Tip #23: Use prove to run Perl 6 tests
• Quick Tip #24: How long did that take?
• Quick Tip #25: Very literal Quoting
• Quick Tip #26: Keep just the good parts
• Quick Tip #27: Read the docs locally

Other Blog Posts

• Rakudo.js Update by Paweł Murias (Reddit comments).
• Complex cocktail causes cunning crash by Jonathan Worthington.
• Datetime Conversion for the Command Line by Moritz Lenz.
• The MAIN Thing by Ken Youens-Clark (Reddit comments).
• Net::OSC received some love this week, any feedback on the distribution is welcome by Sam Gillespie.
• Capturing Groups in Anonymous Regexs? by tektektektektek.

Other Core Developments

• Several cases have been fixed where a function expecting to generate a list would return a single Failure. In these cases, the Failure would make .elems return 1, which would be interpreted as a single element list and ignore the Failure. If one would only be interested in the number of elements, this would be a false positive. So TimToady suggested these cases should probably .throw the exception immediately. And this was implemented for .combinations, .permutations and .grep so far.
• Paweł Murias made sure Rakudo Perl 6 can support superscript powers that are larger then can be stored in a native int.
• Daniel Green added .gist, .perl and .Str methods to BOOTSTRAPATTR, a special case of Attribute-like object that can exist at the very beginning of the compilation of the setting. Which is of great help for core developers.
• Zoffix Znet made Ranges with Num 13x faster because of fixing a performance issue with using === on 2 Nums.
• Moritz Lenz made sure that Match.prematch and Match.postmatch are correct on zero-width matches.
• Samantha McVey has done a lot of work on uninames, univals and uniprops. She also made sure we can now use five more pairs of matching brackets:
  • ⟮ ⟯
U+27EE MATHEMATICAL LEFT FLATTENED PARENTHESIS
U+27EF MATHEMATICAL RIGHT FLATTENED PARENTHESIS

  • ⸤ ⸥
U+2E24 BOTTOM LEFT HALF BRACKET
U+2E25 BOTTOM RIGHT HALF BRACKET

  • ⟬ ⟭
U+27EC MATHEMATICAL LEFT WHITE TORTOISE SHELL BRACKET
U+27ED MATHEMATICAL RIGHT WHITE TORTOISE SHELL BRACKET

  • ⸢ ⸣
U+2E22 TOP LEFT HALF BRACKET
U+2E23 TOP RIGHT HALF BRACKET

  • ⸦ ⸧
U+2E26 LEFT SIDEWAYS U BRACKET
U+2E27 RIGHT SIDEWAYS U BRACKET

• Jonathan Worthington fixed another set of Proc::Async related issues and optimized Int to (native) int conversion.
• And many, many other fixes and optimizations (about 80 commits), mostly done by Zoffix Znet!

Ecosystem Additions

Quite a nice batch again!

• WaitGroup by Shoichi Kaji.
• Manifesto by Jonathan Stowe.
• SQL::NamedPlaceholder by Asato Wakisaka.
• Algorithm::Genetic by Sam Gillespie.
• UNIX::Daemonize by Paweł Szulc.

Not strictly an ecosystem addition, but J.J. Merelo has a Docker image with a Perl 6 installation for Alpine Linux.

Winding Down

It’s really heartwarming to see so many blog posts and so many people attacking such a breadth of problems in Rakudo Perl 6. I can only quote Zoffix Znet from his blog post:

It’s easy to give a helping hand to the core developers of Perl 6 by fixing some of the bugs. Starting from easy things that require nothing more than knowledge of Perl 6, you can progressively learn more about the internals and fix tougher problems.

Join us. We have… bugs to fix!

And on that note: please check in again next week for more Perl 6 news!