2017.17 Interesting Times

Indeed. The past week saw the Rakudo Compiler Release 2017.04 have several point updates. Zoffix Znet explains it all in The Failure Point of a Release. The good news: if you’re waiting for a Rakudo Star Release of 2017.04, a release candidate is now available for testing. So please do!

Distribution License

Samantha McVey found that a lot of distributions in the ecosystem have a poor definition of the license they are released under. So she wrote a call to action in: Camelia Wants YOU to Add License Tags to Your Module! So please do!

The Perl Conference – US

The preliminary schedule for the Perl Conference - US on 19-21 June (formerly known as YAPC::NA) is now available. Please note that Damian Conway will be giving some interesting Perl 6 related tutorials!

Core Developments

• Stefan Seifert fixed an issue with a packaged Inline::Perl5 trying to access a Proxy‘s FETCH method. A problem with the %?RESOURCES hash and NativeCall library name resolution was also fixed. He also made dependency resolution no longer depend on filesystem timestamps.
• Zoffix Znet continued his work on the IO Grant apart from teaching his bots new tricks.
• TimToady made user grammars work more like classes, specifically with regards to .new.
• dogbert17 found the source of a problem with the HARNESS_TYPE=6 spectesting, which Timo Paulssen then fixed.
• And some other smaller fixes and optimizations, apart from the ones that Zoffix Znet already mentioned.

Blog Posts

Wow, what a nice bunch of blog posts!

• Perl 6 Performance and Reliability Engineering: Grant Report by Jonathan Worthington.
• The 24 Puzzle, in Perl 6, using Channels and Promises by brian d foy.
• Soft call operator: ~> (thoughts) by KES.
• Perl 6 IO TPF Grant: Monthly Report (April, 2017) by Zoffix Znet.
• Dealing With Fallout by Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer.
• You can call me Whatever you like by Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer.
• The root of all eval by Carl Mäsak.
• Massively reducing MoarVM Fixed Size Allocator contention by Jonathan Worthington.
• Project Euler #01: Multiples of 3 and 5 by derrickcope.
• As many digits as you like by brian d foy.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Readable regexes by Zoffix Znet.
• German Perl Workshop (26-28 June) by Moritz Lenz.
• New Linux packages by Zoffix Znet.
• Link to some ecosystem module? by Zoffix Znet.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Passing pointer to pointer in Perl 6 Nativecall by Curt Tilmes.
• Passing an array of structures to a Perl 6 Nativecall function by Curt Tilmes.
• How do I just create a parse tree with Perl 6 grammar? by blippy.
• How do I write a Perl 6 macro to enquote text? by blippy.
• How to return the values in a junction as an array? by hwding.

Ecosystem Additions

• MinG by Ian Tayler.
• TagLibC by eater.
• Config by Patrick Spek.
• PostCocoon::Url by eater.
• Config::Parser::yaml by Patrick Spek.

Winding down

Yours truly missed most of the excitement the past week on account of being on the road a lot. In a way, I’m glad I did. On the other hand, feels like I should have been around. Ah well, you can’t have it all. But if you want more, please check in again next week for more Perl 6 news!