2017.18 Starlight, Starbright

Thanks to Steve Mynott, we have another Rakudo Star release: R* 2017.04 is now available for Unix, MacOS and Windows. The announcement has many “too many to list” bullet points. Which is correct, because a lot was improved in Rakudo Perl 6 and the ecosystem in the past 3 months since the last Rakudo Star release.

Perl Developer Survey

The good people of BuiltInPerl published the results of the yearly Perl Developer Survey. Alas, not a lot of useful information about the adoption of Perl 6 yet, but I have a feeling we will see that in next year’s edition!

Unicode Grant

The Unicode improvement Grant Proposal by Samantha McVey has been accepted! Looking forward to seeing more of Samantha McVey‘s excellent work!

Core Developments

• More than half of the modules in the ecosystem now have a properly specified license field in their meta-information. Check out Samantha McVey‘s blog post to see why that is a good idea.
• Zoffix continued his work on the IO grant, with many fixes and documentation improvements. He also fixed various issues with andthen and orelse.
• Paweł Murias fixed the code to check for 32-bitness of the build not only on the MoarVM backend, but also on the Javascript backend!
• Stefan Seifert speeded up module loading a bit more still. It also appears we’re getting really close to shipping binary packages of modules!
• Stdin and stdout are now correctly selected for the right type of (error) messages coming from the Perl 6 NQP bootstrap. Thanks to Jan-Olof Hendig!
• Elizabeth Mattijsen improved the speed of the (+) and (.) set operators by 2.5x upto 60x.
• Jonathan Worthington made sure that roles with native attributes that have a default value, work with the standard .new object initialization logic.
• And as usual, many other smaller bugfixes and other improvements.

Blog posts

• I have csv file and want to count words by redmuston.
• Perl nested arrays by aviationdrone.
• Issue All The Things by Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer.
• Perl 5 vs Perl 6 by rub_ixcube.
• Blog Engine In Perl 6 by Gábor Szabó (Reddit comments).
• Calculate the sum of the primes by derrickcope.
• Letting templates do what you mean by Bart Wiegmans.
• How can one remove old/unused modules by dominix-pf.

A Flash from the Past

Ingo Blechschmidt pointed yours truly to a nice set of slides about the history of Pugs. If you’re new to Perl 6, it might give you some perspective on the shoulders of giants on which the currently most active version of Perl 6 has been built.

Meanwhile on the book front

It is now official: the Perl 6 book that Moritz Lenz is working on (previously called Perl 6 By Example), will be published by Apress as Perl 6 Fundamentals – A Primer with Examples, Projects, and Case Studies. This means we now have two mainline publishers publishing Perl 6 books (the other being O’Reilly with Think Perl 6 by Laurent Rosenfeld). Who, incidentally, had an interview about his book with brian d foy. Highly recommended!

Meanwhile on Twitter

• I’m now a maintainer of the Rakudo * Chocolatey package by brian d foy.
• Perl  Phasers by Zoffix Znet.
• Natural Habitat by Zoffix Znet.
• No refcounting in Perl 6 by Zoffix Znet.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• Jeffrey Goff:
  

  The beginnings of Six::Zilla are out – Dist::Zilla for Perl 6, driven pretty much entirely by a plugin directory. Haven’t done much yet but it’s a start. With the main notion that 6zilla upgrade-dist will do things such as check JSON for invalid or missing fields and update those, check README for mentions of outdated tools. I want to be able to release a full Test-Distribution suite along with this so that module authors can run that check and use the upgrader to handle the simple changes.

• Joe Bukhari:
  

  Perl 6 has changed the way I write. the colon on method arguments makes me happy. I am person who gets happy about syntax, hello Perl bros and sisters guys, sorry I typed it like that. I am just accustomed to typing out Perl 6 in the command line, a place that is good for using Perl 6

• Jeffrey Goff again:
  

  @OSCON 2017 discounts are out! Use SPEXPO for a free Expo Hall pass, or message me for 20% off any other pass! Also don’t forget to come see me live on stage delivering a Perl 6 tutorial, one of ORA’s hottest up-and-coming languages!

Meanwhile in Academia

Damian Conway is busy showing students the best Perl 6 has to offer:

• Parsing Techniques for Bioinformatics in Perl 6 (3 May, Lausanne, Switzerland)
• Thinking Functionally (10 May, Windisch, Switzerland)

Fortunately, an adapted version of the Parsing Techniques class will also be given as a tutorial after the The Perl Conference US (23 June, Washington DC).

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Can Perl 6 assume a positional parameter that’s not the first one? by brian d foy.
• How do I efficiently generate a list of primes in Perl 6? by mscha.

Ecosystem Additions

• Hash::Merge by Patrick Spek.
• TrigPi by Lucien Grondin.
• Grammar::Tracer::Compact by Nadim Khemir.
• Concurrent Progress by Jonathan Worthington.
• Trait::IO by Zoffix Znet.

Winding Down

Phew! A lot more to write in the Weekly than I thought. Fortunately, I was only mildly distracted by some crazy rocket science in action. Check in again next week for more crazy action in the Perl 6 world!