2017.41 The Case for Empathy

Yours truly is glad she can finally link to Ruth Holloway‘s impressive The Case for Empathy keynote at The Perl Conference in Amsterdam. Please excuse the poor sound quality for the first 7 minutes or so: kudos to Amanda who managed to recover and process the sound from that period and supply the subtitles.

Other videos of TPCiA related to Rakudo Perl 6 are:

It is expected that more videos will be uploaded in the coming week, so please check again from time to time!

CPAN6 is here

Zoffix Znet did a lot of work on getting Rakudo Perl 6 modules out of CPAN, just as he promised last week. He explains it all in his blog post CPAN6 is here (Reddit comments). So now we finally have a front-end to browse the available Rakudo Perl 6 distributions that have been uploaded to CPAN!

The Second Bug Squashathon

Last weekend saw the second Community Bug Squashathon, this time focused on fixing problems in the core of Rakudo Perl 6. And the results are in! Looking forward to the next Squashathon, on 4 November 2017!

Inside the head of Larry Wall

Joe Armstrong conducted a Q&A with Larry Wall at the Erlang & Elixir Factory SF Bay Area 2017 conference (Hacker News comments). Also recommended as a very nice intro to Rakudo Perl 6 and the thoughts that have gone into the 100 year language.

Rakudo Perl 6 performance analysis tooling

Timo Paulssen‘s grant proposal for Rakudo Perl 6 performance analysis tooling has been approved by the TPF Grant Committee. Yours truly can hardly wait to see the results of this grant come to fruition!

Call for Rakudo Perl 6 Papers!

This is the time to propose your Rakudo Perl 6 presentations! Please select one or more conferences:

Core Developments

  • The new JIT was merged into MoarVM, and consequently into Rakudo’s main branch. Some teething issues were already fixed by Jonathan Worthington. The new JIT hasn’t yet given us any large speed improvements, but now more people can work on making the JIT smarter and thereby making Rakudo Perl 6 faster! Yours truly is looking forward to be able to help here. Interested in working on this as well? Check out the documentation.
  • Zoffix Znet, with some help of Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker made EVAL/EVALFILE aware of Buf and the utf8-c8 encoding, as was originally stipulated in S29. He also worked on making .gist on several classes a lot faster, and re-enabled the :bin parameter on slurp.
  • Daniel Green made sure that enum values are now also included in errors suggesting identifiers when an identifier could not be found.
  • Larry Wall improved several parsing error messages, specifically on the likely location of the error, e.g. by catching missing expressions on statement modifiers earlier. Christian Bartolomäus and Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev did similar work on improving the error message formerly known as “Malformed my”.
  • Zoffix Znet added a --repl-mode parameter to Rakudo Perl6 6, specifically meant to make testing the REPL easier. He also created new REPL tester logic and adapted the tests to use the new REPL tester logic.
  • Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev also improved many error messages related to mismatched quotes.
  • Jonathan Stowe provided several fixes related to NativeCall and also provided tests for those fixes.
  • Elizabeth Mattijsen made object creation where attributes have compile-time default values (such as has $.foo = 42) about 40% faster. She also improved bare startup time by making code, that would normally run during startup, be pre-compiled in the setting.
  • Zoffix Znet, with some persistent help of Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev, made array slices with a lazy infinite list (such as @a[3..*]) about 4x faster.
  • And many more smaller fixes and improvements.

Other Blog Posts

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Winding Down

Quite an eventful week again, with the JIT being merged and the Squashathon going on. More than 100 commits in the rakudo repository alone. Please check in again next week for more Rakudo Perl 6 news!

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