2017.12 How To Race A Hyper

Jonathan Worthington has focused his attention on race and hyper, two ways of making your code run in parallel more or less automatically. In his most recent blog post he describes the history behind hyper and race, and how he is (re-) considering the exact semantics for the coming 6.d version of Perl 6. Please check out this spreadsheet and let him know what you think about it.

And Yet Another Compiler Release

It was that time of the month again. Zoffix Znet and his trusty bots released Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, Release #109 (aka 2017.03). It’s getting almost as normal as landing a first stage rocket in your back garden. Anyways, this release has fixed the lexical module loading bug, which changes the way symbols exposed by a module are visible in your code. This was announced last December. Should you not have changed your code yet to take this bug fix into account, you can take a look at the Lexical require upgrade info, posted by Zoffix Znet.

Core Developments

• Samantha McVey made case-insensitive regex matching better and 20%-30% faster by using foldcase internally in a smarter way.
• AlexDaniel noticed that was not properly set up for handling lambda’s, and knew how to fix that as well.
• After much discussion, Zoffix Znet removed support for the special ⁇ ‼ Unicode ternary operator. No worries, ?? !! are still there!
• Zoffix Znet also fixed an issue with map with blocks that are guaranteed not to return a Slip. And also made IO::Pipe.lines 3x faster by removing code as part of the work on the IO grant.
• Timo Paulssen fixed an issue with nqp::p6bool which wasn’t aware of the existence of native variables, causing unnecessary boxing/unboxing.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made the .WHICH on Cool types about 1.8x faster, which should cause an improvement when using Cool values with .unique, Sets, Bags and object hashes. She also fixed an issue with rotor.
• Fernando Correa fixed an issue with flattening in a triangular reduce using infix: and some Cool / Str infinilooping in multiple dispatch.
• Daniel Green fixed an issue with the ~^ operator on Bufs.
• And of course many other smaller improvements and bug fixes!

Blog Posts

• Plotting using Matplotlib and Inline::Python by Moritz Lenz.
• What Is The Future Of The Perl Language Beyond 2017 by Quora (Reddit comments).
• The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y” by Erik Bern (Reddit comments).
• Perl 6 Book by Enkidu.
• “No fetching backend available” when using zef by elbitjusticiero.
• Install Rakudo Perl 6 on remote host with Sparrowdo by Alexey Melezhik.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Easy install Perl 6 apps by Zoffix Znet.
• Mathematically correct code by Jeffrey Goff.
• Perl 6 Support on repl.it by replit.
• Just presented sparrowdo by Alexey Melezhik.
• Perl 6 from system packages not always a good idea by Zoffix Znet.
• Named parameter keyed to the name of the variable by Zoffix Znet.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• How do I write micro-grammars in perl 6? by blippy.
• Wrapping a method using several source files by Stamm.

Ecosystem Additions

An interesting addition for packaging up your applications, an easier way to do an HTTP client, and an interface to ftplib!

• App::InstallerMaker::WiX by Jonathan Worthington.
• WWW by Zoffix Znet.
• Net::FTPlib by loren.

Winding Down

Still very busy. Even though it apparently is spring now, it feels more like autumn. Let the sunshine in! See you next week, for more Perl 6 news.