2017.26 Half Way There

Feels like everybody is either preparing for a conference, at a conference or recovering from a conference. A quiet week, with record temperatures at various Perl 6 core developers locations, which was not helping productivity.

Core Developments

• Stefan Seifert made starting of installed scripts significantly faster by providing a faster, more specific interface to the CompUnit::Repository API (starting zef is now typically 1.5x faster).
• Nick Logan made sure that the right %?RESOURCES is used for modules that get loaded using a CUR::FileSystem repository.
• Zoffix Znet made .tail up to 2x faster by using the information of a count-only method if available in the iterator (e.g. when doing %hash.keys.tail).
• Elizabeth Mattijsen did some more speedup work: calling BUILD or TWEAK is now 15x faster if objects are created without specifying any parameters. She also fixed some issues with inter-QuantHash coercers, such as coercing a mutable SetHash to an immutable Set. Finally she did a lot of work on the (-) (aka ∖) set difference operator, making it between 2x to 100x faster (depending on arguments).
• Jonathan Worthington is working on a lot of low-level I/O improvements. This is a work in progress which I’m looking forward to tell more about next week.

Blog Posts

• Perl6::Controls by Damian Conway (Reddit comments).
• Less than 24 hours till the end of the Bailador campaign by Gábor Szabó.
• Seqs, Drugs, And Rock’n’Roll by Zoffix Znet (Reddit comments).
• Highlights from TPC 2017 by Kivanc Yazan.
• How much is Perl 6 ready for web development? What web framework would you recommend? by koaroko210.
• Living on the (b)leading edge by Moritz Lenz.
• Creating a simple DSL: do … end by Konjikuru.
• Extending the Bailador crowdfunding campaign by another month by Gábor Szabó.

The Perl Conference – US

Last week saw The Perl Conference US (formerly known as YAPC::NA). The videos of the presentations are available on YouTube. The following videos are Perl 6 related. Or I find them in need of more exposure:

• :Perl6 by Brock Wilcox.
• Perl::XX::More by Deirdré Foster.
• Perl 6 Str considered harmful by Chas. Owens.
• Impact of U.S. Immigration Policies on Open Source Communities by James E. Keenan.
• Adventures in Failure: Error handling culture across languages by Andrew Grangaard (start of Perl 6 part).
• Extending Perl 6 Command Line Argument Parsing using Metaprogramming by Brian Duggan.
• Your Perl 5 Brain On Perl 6 by Bruce Gray.
• LibCurl, the BEST web client for Perl 6 by Curt Tilmes.
• A Vim Environment For Perl Developers by Damian Conway.
• Hold My Beer And Watch This! by Stevan Little.
• A Great Huge Love by Nick Prather.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Think Perl 6 Arrived by Moritz Lenz.
• NRDVANA by Zoffix Znet.
• use v6c by Zoffix Znet.
• Word Ligatures by Moritz Lenz.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Meaning of @$array and other constructs by lisprogtor.
• Any string port similar to Racket Scheme for reading data? by lisprogtor.
• How to do something at BEGIN and END of piped $*IN? by lisprogtor.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Any text editors for programming that support the secondary selection clipboard? by ToddAndMargo.
• Parameters from the command line: how do they do that? by Todd Chester.

Ecosystem Additions

• Dictionary::Create by Fyodor Sizov.
• TCC (Tiny C Compiler) by Curt Tilmes.
• HTTP::Server::Ogre by Martin Barth.

Winding Down

Well, compared to the weeks before, not as much happened. But under the hood, things are brewing. And it’s not necessarily beer. So check in again next week for more freshly brewed Perl 6 news!