2018.10 Pragmatic Perl

Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi made all of the interviews he has done for the (Russian language) Pragmatic Perl website from 2013 to 2015 available in English as a single PDF for easy offline reading (Reddit comments). Although the interviews are at least 2 years old, they still feel very up-to-date. Of the 17 interviewees, these 10 had something to say about Perl 6: Sawyer X, Stevan Little, chromatic, Marc Lehmann, Tokuhiro Matsuno, Randal Schwartz, Ricardo Signes, Renée Bäcker, David Golden and Philippe Bruhat. A very interesting (at 120+ pages maybe long) read! Kudos to Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi!

Rakudo Perl 6 in Alpine

Rakudo Perl 6 is now part of the Alpine Linux distribution in edge/testing. Another step towards easy availability of Rakudo Perl 6 in the Linux world!

Performance Analysis Tooling

Timo Paulssen was finally able to start on his Rakudo Perl 6 Performance Analysis Tooling Grant. So now running your asynchronous code with --profile will produce some real results! He describes the progress in a blog post titled Delays and Delights.

Curating And Improving Perl 6 documentation

The TPF Grants Committee has approved JJ Merelo’s grant proposal for improving the Perl 6 documentation. Can’t wait to see the improvements to documentation that it will bring us!

Polishing Rationals

Zoffix Znet created a proposal to make Rationals work better in Rakudo Perl 6. Apart from making Rationals more consistent, he also expects to see some performance gains as well! And to make this all happen sooner rather than later, he drafted a Grant Proposal for the next round of TPF grants.

Other Core Developments

• Ticket status of past week.
• Jonathan Worthington changed the extension of the setting files from .pm to .pm6 to follow the advice of the documentation.
• TimToady decided that say() will not autothread. This after a long discussion on whether it should or not.
• Zoffix Znet made Num.Bool about 9x faster. He also fixed a scoping issue with Blocks in regexes, and fixed .grep on HyperSeq/RaceSeq. But that’s not it yet: he also fixed an issue with NativeCall and precompiled modules.
• Christian Bartolomäus again fixed various old and new issues specific to the JVM backend.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen changed substr() to be a frontend to Str.substr, instead of vice-versa. She also made substr() upto 1.5x and Str.substr upto 3x faster. She did the same with substr-rw, which only got upto 20%/30% faster. She also made sure that Unicode aliases of several operators (≤, ≠, ≥ and −) are now just as fast as their ASCII counterparts.
• And many other smaller fixes and improvements.

Blog Posts

• Some Things I Want by Bart Wiegmans.
• What does gist do? by Andrew Shitov.
• The EVAL routine, part 2 by Andrew Shitov.
• DB::Pg — PostgreSQL access by perlcurt.
• printf rounding inconsistencies at 4 decimal places by rage_311.
• And where is Larry? by mpersico.
• Atomic operations by Andrew Shitov.
• Redeclaration of a symbol by Andrew Shitov.
• .pl or .pl6? by shinobicl.
• The smartness of the sequence operator, part 1 by Andrew Shitov.
• Infinite, cycling sequences by brian d foy (Reddit comments).
• Setting timeouts by Andrew Shitov.
• Examining the enum type by Andrew Shitov.
• Pick And Choose by 0racle (Reddit comments).

Meanwhile in StackOverflow

• NativeCall loading a library symbol I don’t call by Curt Tilmes.
• What is the meaning of <.before …>? by Håkon Hægland.
• Check if STDIN has data by byteunit.
• Specify common grammar actions for rules of different arity by rubystallion.

Meanwhile in Twitter

• Ready for Brno Meetup by Thomas Klausner.
• Speaking about Perl 6 features by GoodData.
• Slides of Brno meeting by Jonathan Worthington.
• Fun on lock-free queuing by Jonathan Worthington.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• I need help with NativeCall by ToddAndMargo.

Meanwhile on PerlMonks

• RFC: system calls on Unicode filesystem by daxim.

Perl 6 in comments

• C and Perl 6 code doing the same thing by b2gills.
• More batteries with Perl 6 by labster.
• Like Perl 6 and Python 3 by TheAceOfHearts.
• Perl 6 breaks regexp syntax by jwilk.
• Periodic Table Of The Operators by plainblackguy.

Winding Down

The weather has turned from record breaking cold for the time of the year, to a nice spring. In the matter of a day! Feels to me we’re going to see some exciting budding buds in the coming weeks, if the weather is any indication. So please check in again next week for more budding!