2017.04 Welcome!

The Rakudo core development team has two new members! Please welcome Nick Logan (aka ugexe) and Christian Bartolomäus (aka bartolin). Followers of the development of Rakudo Perl 6 will recognize these names: they have been providers of many Pull Requests to the various Perl 6 related repositories for many years already. Here’s to them hoping they will continue their excellent work!

Rakudo 2017.01 Released

Zoffix Znet and his trusty bots have released yet another version of the Rakudo Perl 6 Compiler (Hacker News comments). Steve Mynott has been following closely in his footsteps and already put up a Rakudo Star 2017.01 Release Candidate. Please check them out if you can!

Grant Proposal

Zoffix Znet has made a Grant Proposal: Standardization, Test Coverage, and Documentation of Perl 6 I/O Routines. Having been down the I/O rabbit hole myself, I can only wish him all the support he can get, be it moral, technical or financial. So please let the TPF know what you think about the grant proposal!

Blog Posts

• Reddit comments on the last Perl 6 Weekly
• Once A Week by Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer.
• Perl 6 Review by Moritz Lenz.
• Once A Week A Happy Zef by Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer.
• An informal comparison of sparrow and ansible eco systems by Alexey Melezhik.
• BBEdit Text Filters in Perl 6 by brian d foy.
• Building Perl6 with Visual C++ 2015 by brakmic.

Core Developments

• Incompatible Change: assigning Empty (aka the empty slip()) to a shaped array will now throw an exception.

  my @a[10];
  @a = @b;     # potentially empty array ok
  @a = Empty;  # always a mistake
  # Cannot Empty a shaped array as its size is fixed
  

• New Feature: You can now call .skip(N) on any Seq or Iterable to skip the indicated number of values, similar to .head(N) (giving you only the first N values) or .tail(N) (giving you only the last N values). The reactive counterpart on Supply was also created.
• New Feature: You can now call .batch(N) on any Seq or Iterable to batch the given number of values into a List (as a single value). The reactive counterpart on Supply already existed.
• New Feature: You can now call next in whenever blocks (implemented by Timo Paulssen).
• Zoffix Znet fixed various issues with cmp and eqv with edge cases of Num and Real values such as NaN and signed zeroes. He also fixed an issue with the handling of empty Slips in xx.
• Daniel Green fixed an issue with calling lines() when STDIN has already been read completely. He also made postfix ++ and -- about 5% faster.
• Samantha McVey has been mainly busy in the background. The currently most visible work is making htmlify.p6 (the script that takes all of the pod documentation to turn it into HTML) about 25% faster.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made .rotor between 15x and 20x faster, permutations() 2x to 24x faster, List/Array.fmt about 60x faster, List/Array.join about 20% faster.
• And many more bugfixes and other improvements!

Meanwhile on Twitter

Moritz Lenz informs us that the Perl 6 News Feed on Twitter is doing very well. In the past week, my attention was drawn to the following tweets:

• Yey Perl 6 Programming!
• A Full Shelf Of Perl 6 Books!
• It’s pretty darn close the best programming language ever created
• Rakudo 1000th Pull Request Merged

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• How to use in user-defined character class or range?
• How can I slice a string like Python does in Perl 6?
• What is the difference in contexts in nested and non-nested maps in Perl 6?
• Can I insert named captures in the Match tree without actually matching anything?
• How do I change the size of an array in Perl 6 after creation?
• What’s the best way to check if an element is in a list?
• Why would you use a proto rule in a Perl 6 grammar?
• How to match a character only under some conditions?
• Should Perl 6 be able to untangle the inclusion of the same role from different sources?

Ecosystem Additions

Not so many this week 😦

• US-ASCII by Ronald Schmidt.
• Git::Config by Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer.

Winding Down

Again, quite some tea was necessary. Don’t forget to come to the Perl DevRoom at FOSDEM on 4 and 5 February! Hope to see you there! Please check in again next week.