Yes, it’s going to be a prime year this year.
say "Prime Year" if 2017.is-prime;
In other ways, Perl 6 is also ready for the future!
say "News" if True but False;
Leaving it to the reader to decide which way that will go 😏
Perl 6 at a Glance
Andrew Shitov has beaten everybody with the first (modern) Perl 6 book on the market. So that will make at least four generic Perl 6 books this year. Can’t wait to actually have them all in my hands!
Samantha McVey
It is an honour to welcome our latest Perl 6 Core Developer. Looking at her track record so far, one knows that she will do great things in the coming years. Meanwhile, I will try to Keep Calm and Continue Programming.
Core Developments
- Samantha McVey continued her outstanding work on Unicode support in
MoarVM, which we should see in Perl 6 before long. She implemented the Unicode Collation Algorithm in MoarVM/NQP. She also improved Emoji support as well as handling of many Unicode properties, such as theBidi_Mirroring_Glyphproperty. - Jonathan Worthington re-implemented the
utf8-c8encoding (the one that tries to interpret the input as UTF-8, but starts creating synthetic codepoints for those byte-sequences that aren’t UTF-8), making sure it will never segfault anymore and will always roundtrip regardless of which garbage is thrown at it. He also made sure that/:ignoremark \"/now actually works. - Douglas Jenkins did a lot of work on optimizing
IO::Socket::INET. - Christian Bartolomäus again fixed various issues on the JVM backend.
- Zoffix Znet worked a lot on
combinations, fixing consistency in handling of edge cases. He also worked on.linesand its handling of limits and the handling ofRatwith0as the denominator. And many other smaller and bigger things. - Daniel Green worked on the
Cursorinternals to make them a bit faster: since this affects all regex matching / grammar parsing, we gladly take any improvement in that area. - Elizabeth Mattijsen worked a bit more on sorting, making sorting of 0, 1 and 2 element lists up to 50% faster.
- And many other smaller things, with about 150 commits between the MoarVM, nqp and Rakudo repositories.
Blog Posts
- Anything out there for using perl to cast to a chromecast audio device? by sanburg.
- What’s your preferred way to structure / validate parameter arguments? by small-wolf.
indir()changes the directory just for its block by brian d foy.- How do you write bindings to things? by analogphototaker.
- Did Larry Wall work at NASA? by ibarelysleep.
- Sharing your p6 program with others. Any plan to implement a compile to executable/binary file feature? by analogphototaker.
- Hot Programming Trends in 2016 by Rachel Roumeliotis.
- Silent Cron, a Cron Wrapper by Moritz Lenz.
- Comparing custom classes with eqv() by perlcurt.
- Rakudo Star – Past, Present and Future by Steve Mynott (Reddit and Reddit comments).
Ecosystem Additions
Quite a nice bunch again this week.
- Number::Bytes::Human by Douglas Jenkins.
- Math::Constants by JJ Merelo.
- Sparrowdo Ruby Bundler by Alexey Melezhik.
- Tinky::Hash by Marcel Timmerman.
Winding Down
One could say we’re off to a great start of the New Year! It also appears that everybody in the Perl 6 community still has the same number of fingers and eyes as before all of the New Year’s Eve fireworks. Please check in again next week for your weekly dose of Perl 6 News!
Weekly changes in and around Raku (Née Perl 6) 