2017.33 In Review

Evan Miller has written an extensive review about Rakudo Perl 6. And the Internet was set ablaze. Well, eh, not really, but quite extensive discussions on Hacker News and Reddit followed from it. Although he clearly was caught out by some documentation issues (e.g., you can have both positional and named parameters in a call), the review appears to be balanced and just, and did I mention extensive? Some quotes:

The Perl 6 feature I was most excited to read about — in fact the initial reason I was drawn to Perl 6, aside from morbid curiosity — is the inclusion of grammars in the language.

Perl 6’s string support, and Unicode support in particular, is the best in the business.

Perl 6 might have my favorite function-dispatching mechanism of any language I’ve used; it’s certainly the most flexible.

The most pleasant set of surprises for me with Perl 6 function-calling — in fact some of the more pleasant surprises in all of Perl 6 — is the nearly frictionless interfacing with C libraries.

Perl 6 is one-of-a-kind; no one can argue with that.

What can I add to that? Read the whole review and judge for yourself!

Welcome Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev!

The number of people with a commit bit to the rakudo repository has just been incremented. Or as Zoffix Znet so partylike tweeted:

AlexDaniel++ joined the team

I can only add that AlexDaniel has already been responsible for quite a number of Pull Requests in the past years, built quite a few IRC bots and will now also be responsible for the next Rakudo compiler release the coming weekend!

Videos from TPCiA

The official videos of TPCiA are still in post-production. Below are the ones that were streamed to FaceBook using a camera in the hands of Andrew Shitov:

• Three Little Words by Damian Conway (Reddit comments on TPCiDC version).
• It’s in the bag: How to cheat at interviews using Perl 6 by John Haltiwanger.
• Functional Programming in Perl 6 by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Unicode Internals of Perl 6 by Samantha McVey.
• High End Unicode in Perl 6 by Samantha McVey.
• Perl 6 – Superglue for the 21st Century by Brian Duggan.
• 20 years of Perl by brian d foy.

Core Developments

• Jonathan Worthington mostly worked on MoarVM internals: this resulted in a 17% performance improvement of the test-t “real life” benchmark. And fixed some possible memory leaks with supply and react blocks.
• Stefan Seifert made some NativeCall improvements, which also had a positive effect on the Inline::Perl5 version of said “real life” benchmark. He also made RAKUDO_MODULE_DEBUG output reproducible.
• Samantha McVey fixed some issues with ignoremark and ignorecase.
• And some more smaller fixes and changes.

Other Blog Posts

• Take a walk on the C side, ddt, du du, du du … by Nadim Khemir.
• My Ten Years Of Perl 6 by Moritz Lenz.
• Supporting the Community by Mark Keating.
• Ducky – lightweight Docker containers provision tool by Alexey Melezhik.
• Printing to Standard Error in Perl 6 by Gábor Szabó (Reddit comments).
• On Good Terms With Constants by Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer.
• Things I Learned at TPCiA by Thomas Klausner.
• The Perl Conference in Amsterdam by Lance Wicks.
• Swiss Perl Workshop Pre Conf Meetup + More News For Attendees by Lee Johnson.

Meanwhile on Twitter

First the Perl Conference in Amsterdam related tweets:

• TPCiA kickoff
• EPO Hack
• Training Day
• High-end Unicode
• Machine Learning
• Great talks and atmosphere
• From The Trenches
• ? Good Question!
• Damian Suggests
• Unicode Internals
• Hacking the JIT
• Amazing
• Sharing Javascript
• Rakudo.js
• Postcards with love
• 5 Year Old Android
• Recovering
• Empathy
• Stand up!

And the other tweets:

• Speculative Invocation Optimization by Zoffix Znet.
• ≤, ≥, ≠ aren’t most outrageous by Zoffix Znet.
• Million Lines faster than Pumpking Perl 5 by Zoffix Znet.
• Fatalized zero-width by Zoffix Znet.
• 418–? by Zoffix Znet.
• Uzu by Sam Morrison.
• Perl 6 Deep Dive by Moritz Lenz.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• What is the difference between A => 1 and 'A' => 1? by Christopher Bottoms.
• Batch text processing with Perl 6 by Suman.
• Why isn’t my object attribute populated? by Christopher Bottoms.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Suggestions on Learning Perl 6 by Ari King.
• User defined infix operators and whitespace by Simon Proctor.
• Running external CLI tool and capturing output by Gábor Szabó.

Ecosystem Additions

• WWW::SilverGoldBull by Denis Boyun.
• PDF::Content by David Warring.
• PDF::Lite by David Warring.
• PDF::API6 by David Warring.
• Hematite by Andre Bras.

Winding Down

What a week for the members of the organisation team and volunteers of the The Perl Conference in Amsterdam, of which yours truly happened to be one. Normalcy is scheduled to return in the coming days. Well, until the Swiss Perl Workshop of course. For which yours truly still has to start on her presentation. Ah well, it will be great on the day with a cast of presenters like Jonathan Worthington and Damian Conway! Meanwhile, see you all for the next Perl 6 Weekly!