2016.51 Flowing Towards Christmas

This weekend saw the Rakudo 2016.12 compiler release. This will be the last release that has a bug in the module loading logic. This bug makes a module available globally, when it shouldn’t. As Zoffix explains in this announcement. So if you’re a module developer, please make sure that your module keeps working the coming month before the next release, which will be on the 21 January 2017. On behalf of the Perl 6 core developers, thank you!

Adventing Along Some More

Some real cool advent posts this week (again)!

• Day 13 – Audio Streaming done Completely Wrong by Jonathan Stowe.
• Day 14 – Targetting MoarVM, the Wrong Way by cygx.
• Day 15 – Parsing Globs using Grammars by zostay (Reddit comments).
• Day 16: The Meta spec, Distribution, and CompUnit::Repository explained-ish by Nick Logan.
• Day 17 – Testing in virtual time by Jonathan Worthington.
• Day 18 – Asynchronous Workflow with Tinky by Jonathan Stowe.
• Day 19 – Fixing Flow by Nigel Hamilton.

And now only 5 more to go 😦

Learning Perl 6 Kickstarted Succeeded!

We have liftoff! With 563 backers and $40,404 in pledges before the deadline, the project has been brought to life. And here are the last Quick Tips that brian d foy promised us:

• Quick Tip #28: Perl 6’s Schwartzian Transform
• Quick Tip #29: Flip-flopping junctions
• Quick Tip #30: Uninstall a Perl 6 module

Other Blog Posts

Not so many, but still a few:

• Closures, alternatives, map in Perl 6 by Ken Youens-Clark.
• The Time For Perl 6 by BIP.
• Testing the Timestamp Converter by Moritz Lenz.

Core Developments

• Samantha McVey continued her work on unimatch and uniprop.
• Zoffix fixed warnings in the REPL, several broken .perl methods, andthen → orelse chaining, last without "foo".index("a") and making sure the endpoints are never picked with Range.rand.
• TimToady added a warning that will catch the my $s = 1, 3 ... 15 thinko (it should be my $s = (1, 3 ... 15)) and similar cases involving meta-operators.
• Stefan Seifert made building of NQP more flexible to make life easier for packagers. He was of course also responsible for the lexical module loading fixes that were merged into the bleeding edge of Rakudo Perl 6. And the text of the announcement!
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed a problem with grep and the use of last in a block that did not contain any phasers. She also made indexes of the form @a[*-1] about 2.5x as fast.
• And many more smaller fixes and speed improvements.

Ecosystem Additions

Another nice batch, some of them from the Perl 6 Advent Calendar.

• JSON::Hjson by Takumi Akiyama.
• IRC::TextColor by Samantha McVey.
• Tinky::JSON by Jonathan Stowe.
• Sparrowdo::Chef::Client by Alexey Melezhik.
• Test::Scheduler by Jonathan Worthington.

Winding Down

The dark days before Christmas are almost over. See you again, next week, JAC (Just After Christmas)!