2017.29 Zoffix Released

This week saw the end of an era: Zoffix Znet and his trusty bots released Rakudo Perl 6 2017.07 compiler. Which will be the base of the 2017.07 Rakudo Star release within the next few days by the looks of it.

So why is that the end of an era? Well, because Zoffix decided that he would like to pass on the baton of Release Manager to someone else, which AlexDaniel graciously accepted!

I would hereby like to specifically thank Zoffix Znet for everything he has done to make the release process as easy as it is now. And to thank him for the 14 consecutive monthly Rakudo Perl 6 releases he as done, which is a record! Tip of the hat!

The Perl Conference in Amsterdam

The final list of presentations is now available: no further talks will be added. Unless you want to submit a Lightning Talk! If you’ve already registered, please mark the presentations that you want to attend, so that the organisers can have a better idea of the size of the room needed for that presentation.

Furthermore, it is now certain that there will be 2 days of Hackathon following the Perl Conference in Amsterdam (Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 August) at the same venue. Yours truly will be there for sure, and hopefully a lot of other people working on either Rakudo Perl 6 or Pumpkin Perl 5!

Core Developments

• Stefan Seifert fixed a precompilation issue on Windows with file handles left open when an up-to-date check failed.
• Jonathan Worthington had a deserved few days off, but nonetheless managed to fix several problems in MoarVM that would expose themselves as segfaults or causing spurious and hard to track problems. He also made sure that dynamic variables (specifically $*THREAD) are cleared from the cache whenever a halted job continues execution again (which may be on a different OS thread in 6.d).
• Samantha McVey worked on string concatenation, making sure that no (potentially expensive) normalization of strings is done, unless it is actually necessary.
• Nick Logan fixed an issue with :merge on a Proc object. He also made sure that done and/or quit are always called on all all taps of a Supply. He also improved the error message on use lib "".
• Zoffix Znet removed some floating point noise in the denominator of Rat literals.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen more or less concluded her work on the set operators by adding thorough testing, which exposed a number of issues, and fixing those.
• And many other smaller fixes and improvements.

Blog Posts

• Bailador is still at its beginning.. by Martin Barth.
• Why am I writing the Bailador Book? by Gábor Szabó (Reddit comments).
• LWP::Simple – a simple web client in Perl 6 by Gábor Szabó (Reddit comments).
• The Loss of Name and Orientation by Moritz Lenz (Reddit comments).
• Iterate through array of hashes by FuzzyBear2017.
• We Have A Marketing Repo! by Zoffix Znet.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Talk to #perl6 without an IRC client by Zoffix Znet.
• Why spend 9 hours programming when you can be done in 5? by Zoffix Znet.
• Unicode in Rakudo Perl 6 by Zoffix Znet.
• Emoji: one char long by Zoffix Znet.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• How could I subclass Perl 6’s IO::Handle? by brian d foy.
• How does a Perl 6 object find a multi method that might be in a parent class or role? by brian d foy.
• Function argument syntax in the interpreter by lisprogtor.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Clone and deep copy of arrays by Gábor Szabó.
• Is there a bash/shlex-like processor with double-quotes handling? by Mark Carter.
• Log::Any performances by Julien Simonet.
• Processing misunderstanding or bug? by Gábor Szabó.
• String to array problem by ToddAndMargo.

Ecosystem Additions

WebService::AWS::S3 by Brian Duggan.

Winding Down

A hot week ahead. Please check again in a week to see how hot it got in Perl 6 land!