2017.30 Starring Fresh Produce

It was a fruitful week. We saw the release of Rakudo Star 2017.07 thanks to Steve Mynott. Apart from a source version, there are also packages for CentOS, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu (thanks to Claudio Ramirez), as well as packages for MacOS and Win64 (thanks to Steve Mynott again). And we had a new ecosystem addition for each day of the week. And the hard copy version of Perl 6 Fundamentals by Moritz Lenz is hitting the bookshelves!

The Perl Conference in Amsterdam

The schedule is now published! In other news, the conference Wiki is being fleshed out. Specific entries of importance are:

• EPO Hackathon – if you want to hack on EPO
• Share a Room – if you want to share a room with someone else to reduce cost
• Volunteers – if you would like to assist the organizers
• Be A Tourist – useful pointers for touristing in Amsterdam

And you can still register!

Blog Posts

• Think Perl 6 mega book review by Nikos Vaggalis (Reddit comments).
• Perl vs Clojure by subogero.
• Swiss Perl Workshop 2017 – Final Call For Papers by Lee Johnson.
• Perl vs Clojure – Reloaded by subogero.
• Outthentic is a script development framework by Alexey Melezhik.
• Can anything save Pumpking Perl 5? by Christopher Burr.
• Sparky is continues integration server with Sparrowdo framework under the hood by Alexey Melezhik.

Core Developments

• Jonathan Worthington continued working on the first step of his overhaul of the MoarVM dynamic optimizer, which optimizes hot code based on collected type information. He now has a branch with optimization and JIT compilation running on a background thread rather than interrupting code, and a new means of data collection that will allow for smarter optimization decisions in the future. Along the way, he has fixed a range of optimization bugs that existed prior to these changes and which were driven out by stresstesting. With everything working again, he will now switch to tuning it ahead of a merge. Finally, he also fixed native callbacks on threads other than the one that provided them in the first place.
• Samantha McVey worked a lot on optimizing concatenation of strings on the MoarVM backend, fixing several bugs along the way.
• Gerd Pokorra added a --libdir parameter to the configuration of Rakudo Perl 6.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made the various stringifications (aka .Str, .gist and .perl) on QuantHashes (aka Set, Bag and Mix) up to 2x faster. Also, the output of .gist is now sorted. She also worked on Bag|Mix.roll making them upto 2x faster, and fixed a bug in Array.join, which ignored the is default setting of the Array on values :deleted from the Array.
• Nick Logan made sure that :ver will be treated as a literal Version, rather than as a string. So that use Test:ver is now completely synonymous with use Test:ver(v6.*).
• Zoffix Znet improved the TODO test handling inside TODOed subtests.
• Stefan Seifert fixed --ll-exception, which was sadly broken (and got into the 2017.07 release unnoticed).
• Timo Paulssen made sure that the installation of Rakudo Perl 6 will not cause execution errors in a script that is running the previous version of Rakudo Perl 6 at the same time.
• And several other improvements and bugfixes.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• “Perl 6 Fundamentals” is now published by Moritz Lenz.
• Does Perl 6 support dependent types? by brian d foy.
• There is also Learning with Perl 6 by Mark Keating.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Extracting from .bib file with Perl 6 by Suman.
• How can you configure Bailador to serve content via TLS (HTTPS)? by S. Albano.
• Custom precompilation location? by Christopher Bottoms.
• Can I limit my Perl 6 program to running under a particular implementation? by brian d foy.
• How can I drop into the Rakudo Perl 6 REPL inside a program? by brian d foy.
• Does Perl 6 have an infinite Int? by brian d foy.
• Does Perl 6 natively support Design by Contract? by contemplator.
• Why is this Perl 6 feed operator a “bogus statement”? by brian d foy.
• How can I pass arguments to a Perl 6 grammar? by brian d foy.
• Is it possible to have two different Perl versions? by Vicky.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Zip mystery by ToddAndMargo.
• Where’s the filter command? by Mark Carter.
• Security and modules question by Andrew Kirkpatrick.
• Memory usage by Gábor Szabó.
• Why is my class rejecting new()? by Mark Carter.
• Is win 32 being worked on? by Mark Carter.
• set (+) set = bag? by Darren Duncan.
• Rakudo Perl 6 Speed Revelation by Shlomi Fish.

Ecosystem Additions

• Swedish::TextDates_sv by svekenfur.
• Text::MiscUtils by Geoffrey Broadwell.
• Grammar::Modelica by albastev.
• Sparky by Alexey Melezhik.
• YAML::Parser::LibYAML by Tony O’Dell.
• 6pm by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Object::Container by moznion.

Winding Down

Ah, looking forward to next week when we will have many more fruity bits. Hope to see you again, then!