2018.03 Blue Note

On the Blue Monday of 2018, it is my solemn duty to inform you that things are not blue in the world of Rakudo Perl 6 at all. The only thing missing is a good main article for the Perl 6 Weekly. So that gives it a bit of a blue note. Plenty of good stuff going on otherwise. So read on!

Core Developments

• Zoffix Znet was very busy again:
  • Several inappropriate useless use warnings were fixed
  • Sped up several parts of Perl 6 Actions
  • Fixed a problem with incrementing/decrementing RatStr allomorphs
  • Meta-operators (such as =~) got some improvements, with the R meta-operator (such as [R~]= for prepending a string) gaining the most: 160x faster!
  • Fixed issues with regards to the (incorrect) specification of traits
  • Made dd more resilient to handling low-level (NQP) values.
• Jonathan Worthington added a lot of optimizations, specifically making :U in signatures faster. He also made several core methods smaller so that they would fall within the inline limit: so when used a lot, they will now be inlined, resulting in much better performance in some situations. Finally, he reworked a lot of the Supply, react and whenever internals: this made a Cro benchmark handle 12% more requests/second.
• Jeremy Studer fixed an issue with .rotor pulling one too many times after the underlying iterator was exhausted.
• Itsuki Toyota added better error messages for Perl 5-style pragmas and issues with versioning of use and need.
• Ben Davies made sure that MoarVM can compile on OpenBSD.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen added Bool candidates for x and xx operators, making x 2x faster, and xx 16x faster when given False, and made |(1,2,3) xx 42 about 3x as fast. She also made having a single LEAVE in a block about 5% faster, which will improve performance of Supply and whenever.
• And many other smaller fixes and improvements.

Blog posts

• Using Perl 6 Notebook in Binder by Suman Khanal.
• Digging into @a[*-1] by Andrew Shitov.
• What does nqp::getattr do? by Andrew Shitov.
• Converting numbers to strings the hard way by brian d foy (Reddit comments).
• The =~= operator by Andrew Shitov.
• Check for match of array in string by FuzzyBear2017.
• The infix nature of the ternary operator by Andrew Shitov.
• Abusing Multiple Dispatch for fun and profit by Jeff Goff.
• What’s the easiest way to identify two or three word chunks of language from a text? by FuzzyBear2017.
• The internals of the ternary operator by Andrew Shitov.
• Obsolete syntax error messages, part 3 by Andrew Shitov.
• The Range method by Andrew Shitov.
• Scintilla / Feature Requests / #1207 Lexer for Perl 6 by Naoum Hankache.

Perl 6 in comments

Sometimes Rakudo Perl 6 is mentioned in comments on blog posts that do not directly relate to Perl 6 necessarily. Yours truly will attempt to collect these and present them here for your perusal. In this first edition, Perl 6 comments from Hacker News of the past month.

• Future of Ruby by ksec.
• A speed that’s usable for applications by Brent Laabs.
• Anything’s possible by astrodust.
• Python 2 and 3 on Windows by sametmax.
• Verge Client by lancew.
• Programming language to learn in 2018 by bobochan.
• Best textbook you’ve read by Tepix.
• Well engineered vs popular by gtycomb.
• Unicode opening possibilities by twhb.
• Not a lot of presence in the past 10 years by grzm.
• Alternatives for bash by I_feel_great.
• The art of the error message by mncharity.
• Pre-Perl 6 days by zellyn.
• Perl 6 quoting by liveoneggs.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Conditional concatenation by Zoffix Znet.
• π-up-to by Zoffix Znet.
• Visualizing QAST output by Zoffix Znet.
• Love parameterised roles by Jonathan Stowe.
• Make your META6.json valid by Zoffix Znet.
• Linux packages for Rakudo 2017.12 by Claudio Ramirez.
• Perl 6 grammars are awesome by Alfie John.
• Fun working on the compiler by Zoffix Znet.
• Prepending to a string by Zoffix Znet.
• Take two elements… by brian d foy.
• Improving your USAGE message by Zoffix Znet.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Why does constraining a named parameter to a definite value make it a required value? by brian d foy.
• Parsing binary structure with a Grammar by smith.
• Why is right associativity not right? by brian d foy.
• Is it possible to provide named parameters with a hash? by Eugene Barsky.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• ListUtil.c: loadable library and perl binaries are mismatched by ToddAndMargo.

Winding Down

Pseudoscientifically speaking it was the most depressing day of the year. So from now on, things can only get less depressing. And that’s a positive thought that yours truly would like to give you this week. See you next week for more news about Rakudo Perl 6!