2016.52 Twittering Towards The End…

…of the year, of course! No (new) Apocalypse planned or anything like that. No, it feels more like there’s a new marketing push gaining strength. For news about the development of Learning Perl 6, you can now follow a dedicated Twitter page: @LearningPerl6, as brian d foy announced recently. Meanwhile, the Perl 6 Facebook Group is now at 340 members. And is still looking for new members!

There hasn’t been much news on Twitter about Perl 6 the past years. The reasons for that are manyfold. But Moritz Lenz has taken it upon him to start a Perl 6 News Feed: @perl6org. If you have anything you want to say on Twitter, contact him about it. Even better, if you would like to help him by tweeting stuff directly on that account, contact him as well. Thank you in advance!

Endventing

The final bunch of the Perl 6 Advent Calendar posts:

• Bridging The Gap by Tadeusz Sośnierz (Hacker News comments).
• Show Me The Data! by Nadim Khemir.
• Generative Testing by Fernando Oliveira (Reddit comments).
• Everything is either wrong or less than awesome by Alex-Daniel Princess.
• Make It Snow by John Haltiwanger.
• One Year On by Elizabeth Mattijsen (Reddit comments).

Please check the Perl 6 Advent Calendar again on the 1st of December, 2017!

Other Blog Posts

• What do you predict will become perl6 best practices and design patterns? by analogphototaker.
• Translating the perlfaq to Perl 6 by brian d foy.
• Making a Perl lib for the Discord API. Should I go with Perl 5 or Perl 6? by _potaTARDIS_.
• How does one convince Pythonistas that Perl is useful/relevant? by Zeekawla99ii.
• Adding on to Channels and Supplies in Perl 6 by Tony O’Dell.
• Testing the Say Function by Moritz Lenz.
• Awesome And Custom by Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer.
• Strip leading spaces from here-docs by brian d foy.

Core Developments

• Samantha McVey continued doing a lot of work on the Perl 6 highlighter, specifically for the docs. Previously the docs were using the Python Pygments highlighter to highlight Perl 6 code. Now it uses Github’s Highlights, which is the same engine Atom and Github use to highlight files. While Github does not yet have the latest and greatest version of atom-language-perl6, the Pull Request updating it has been merged. We only need to wait for the bump of the version of Linguist. She also did a lot of work on Unicode properties, which unfortunately hasn’t come to full fruition just yet.
• Jonathan Worthington fixed an issue that would occur when you were recursing very deeply in code that was using a lot of native arrays. He also fixed an error in the error reporting of exceptions thrown in asynchronous code.
• Daniel Green made IO::Handle.lines and IO::ArgFiles.lines 10% faster. Doesn’t look like a lot, but this being a very basic functionality, we take all the improvement we can get! And this was on top of a 40% improvement he did on the logic handling perl6 -ne!
• After some discussion on #perl6, Zoffix Znet added infix + and infix - for DateTime and Duration. He also made sure that parse-base can handle strings like -.5. And, as usual, he also fixed many other smaller issues, did quite a few awesomisations and was generally busy.
• Nick Logan fixed a problem in the handling of bin/resources when installing modules.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen worked a lot on the sort internals, making sort between 4x (generic List/Array) to 12x faster (for native arrays) and much more memory efficient. She also worked on making Str.split(<a b c>) about 4x faster, which made the test-t canary 15% faster (going from 6.3 to 5.3 seconds).

Not bad for a week in the Holiday Season!

Ecosystem Additions

No ecosystem additions this week. Too bad. But hardly surprising this time of year.

Winding down 2016

This is the last post of the Perl 6 Weekly this year. Only a few issues were missed at the beginning of the year, when everybody was recovering from the frenzy of getting the first official release of Perl 6 into the world. Pretty sure we won’t be missing any issue in 2017! So, until then: be careful with the fireworks, keep all of your fingers and eyes, and see you again next year!