2017.16 IO Hits The Road

Zoffiz Znet and his trusted bots just came out with the 2017.04 Rakudo Compiler Release. It contains the culmination of the IO grant work. A Rakudo Star release should be expected within the next few days, based on this compiler release. Apart from the IO work and all of the other optimization work that has been done, one thing to particularly note is the work that Samantha McVey has done on Unicode support and case-insensitive regex matching. Please have the appropriate amount of more efficient fun!

Perl Toolchain Summit

The Perl Toolchain Summit is now less than a month away. Some people actively developing on Perl 6 will also attend. There are even some Perl 6 related entries on the Project List. Hope to see more Perl 6 related items there soon. And to finally be able to make CPAN support for Perl 6 modules an actual thing!

Core Developments

• Timo Paulssen made it possible for Grammars to precompute their NFAs during precompilation, allowing them to be stored in precompiled modules.
• TimToady continued working on a refactor of Match objects and cursor, which hasn’t produced much improvement yet because of all scaffolding still needed.
• Paweł Murias undid the bitrot that broke the Allocations tab in the output of --profile.
• Stefan Seifert fixed an issue with compilation stores without write access, as well as some issues when using the Staging repo.
• And many other bug fixes and a lot of work on the IO grant, of course!

Other blog posts

• Using matplotlib in Perl 6 (pt. 7 – FINAL) by 0racle.
• Sparrowdo Command Line API by Alexey Melezhik.
• Speeding up Travis by Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer.
• Benchmarking crypt with SHA-512 in Perl 6 by Gábor Szabó.
• Golang’s ‘defer’ in Perl by tnish.
• Slipping in a Config File by Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Handy \qq[] sequences by Zoffix Znet.
• Wow, I never knew. And I write a book about Perl 6 🙂 by Moritz Lenz.
• The Think Perl 6 TeX sources are available by brian d foy.
• OO::Monitors to the rescue! by Jonathan Worthington.
• The finer points of %-sigiled constants by Zoffix Znet.
• Techniques for Efficiently Learning Programming Languages by Daniel Higginbotham.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• How can I send a signal to a process ID? by brian d foy.
• How can I pass a Perl 6 object through a Nativecall callback? by Curt Tilmes.
• Can a finite list be lazy? by brian d foy.
• How can I open a file for writing only when it doesn’t exist? by brian d foy.
• How can I get around a slurpy parameter in the Perl 6 signature? by brian d foy.
• How many promises can Perl 6 keep? by brian d foy.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

Jonathan Stowe says:

If you have been experiencing difficulty accessing certain https web sites with one of the various HTTP clients, you may want to upgrade to the latest OpenSSL module – I’ve just implemented supported for the TLS server name extension which is required for an increasing number of virtual hosting arrangements. It also fixes Webservice::Soundcloud.

Ecosystem Additions

• Sparrowdo::Rakudo by Alexey Melezhik.
• IO::Socket::Async::SSL by Jonathan Worthington.
• Native::Packing by David Warring.
• Log::Any by Julien Simonet.
• Matrix::Client by Matias Linares.
• MessagePack::Class by Jonathan Stowe.

Winding Down

Unexpectedly brought to you from Copenhagen, Denmark. See you again next week for more Perl 6 news!