2018.13 Apply Perl 6

Patrick Spek has written an excellent tutorial (Reddit comments) on how to create an application with Rakudo Perl 6. Apart from a command-line interface, this tutorial shows you how to create a GUI for the application as well. Cool stuff!

Perl 6 Tutorials at TPCiSLC

Two whole-day Perl 6 tutorials will be given at The Perl Conference in Salt Lake City:

• The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to Perl 6 by Jeff Goff (165 US$).
• Making your Perl 5 Modules work in Rakudo Perl 6 by Elizabeth Mattijsen (100 US$).

Be sure to register soon, as places are limited!

Additional Perl 6 presentation at GPW

Yours truly will be giving a keynote titled The Future of Perl is here at the coming German Perl Workshop, hoping it will be received by a lot of open minds.

Core Developments

• Ticket status of past week.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen properly marked produce and reduce as is nodal. This correction in behaviour however broke two tests, that have been deemed incorrect and thus fixed. This may have some ecosystem fallout.
• Samantha McVey added support for the Shift JIS encoding of the windows-932 variety, as well as fixing some edge-cases in the windows1252/windows1251 encoding.
• Stefan Seifert made sure that a change in the underlying NQP will automatically cause a re-compilation of Rakudo Perl 6 itself. He also fixed a race-condition on concurrent access of arrays, as well as an optimization issue with zombie conditionals (such as 42 ?? "answer" !! "huh").
• Zoffix Znet did extensive research into the state of the art of stringification of Nums (aka floating points) and completely reimplemented it using the Grisu3 algorithm. As well as fixing long standing errors in some edge cases of stringification, it also made stringification of Nums twice as fast!
• Timo Paulssen worked on optimizing the supervisor so that it doesn’t allocate anything if nothing is happening. He also changed the nqp::getrusage op so that it takes an integer array as a parameter, instead of allocation a new one each time.
• Jonathan Worthington made sure that Proc::Async.ready now returns the PID of the started process. Just like the more self-documenting new Proc::Async.pid method.
• Daniel Green had several Pull Requests merged to internally use nqp::splice rather than explicit loops doing the copying.
• Jeremy Studer improved the documentation of several NQP ops.
• Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev made sure that, when building the MoarVM Rakudo Perl 6 backend, the (unnecessary) availability of the JVM is no longer checked.
• Paweł Murias improved the parsing of scientific numerals.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen also did many micro-optimizations to specifically reduce the overhead of code run with hyper or race.
• And many other bigger and smaller improvements and additions.

Other Blog Posts

• ANTLR4::Grammar v0.1.0 to Perl 6 CPAN by Jeff Goff.
• London Perl Monger – Tech Meet #1 by Mohammad S Anwar (slides of Simon Proctors presentation).
• Haskell vs Perl 6 – First Impression by Lloyd Fournier (Reddit comments).
• Rebranded rakudup by Steve Mynott.
• Tangentially Related Work by Timo Paulssen.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Fixing an “easy” Num stringification bug by Zoffix Znet.
• Big plans for Perl 6 by Tom Metro.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Curried Function Hangs by user6189164.
• Creating New Operator by user6189164.
• Define ⊤ Symbol by user6189164.
• Difference between .. and ...? by Stefanus.
• Accessing a routine’s Capture from within by JJ Merelo.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• J.J. Merelo:
  

  I’ve just officially started the TPF grant about curating and taking care of the Perl 6 documentation repository. I’ve set up this repo for reports, issues and anything that can’t or shouldn’t go to the doc repo, and of course for your suggestions, offers of help, and so on. Set a watch on it if you want to follow my progress.

• Roland Schmitz:
  

  Reasons to visit the 20th German Perl-Workshop

  • three authors of recent Perl 5 & Perl 6 books are giving talks
  • Perl 5 & Perl 6 core hackers also give talks
  • we have 4 all-day Workshops, where you can dive into a subject matter with a “hands-on” experience for a whole day each
  • lots of nice people from 10 countries are coming

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• CPAN and p6c by Fernando Santagata.

Meanwhile on PerlMonks

• Matrix array of arrays by teun-arno.

Perl 6 in comments

• List comprehensions by Brad Gilbert.
• Not an acronym by Brad Gilbert.
• Glancing towards Perl 6 by ethelward.

Perl 6 Modules

5 new modules:

• Image::QRCode by Fernando Santagata.
• Webservice::AWS::S3 by Brian Duggan.
• Test::SourceFiles by Sam Gillespie.
• Text::Sift4 by Itsuki Toyota.
• Ops::SI by Patrick Spek.

14 updated modules:

• Algorithm::Evolutionary::Simple by JJ Merelo.
• App::Assixt by Patrick Spek.
• ANTLR4::Grammar by Jeff Goff.
• Config by Patrick Spek.
• Terminal::Getpass by Itsuki Toyota.
• Digest::SHA256::Native by Brian Duggan.
• Crypt::RSA by Brian Duggan.
• Net::LubIDN2 by Ben Davies.
• CPAN::Uploader::Tiny by Shoichi Kaji.
• App::Mi6 by Shoichi Kaji.
• Archive::Libarchive::Raw by Fernando Santagata.
• Desktop::Notify by Fernando Santagata.
• Archive::Libarchive by Fernando Santagata.
• Inline::Perl5 by Stefan Seifert.

Winding Down

Quite a nice number of developments in the shortest week of the year (at least where yours truly lives)! Next week’s Perl 6 Weekly will not contain any Easter Eggs. Or will it? Please check in again to find out!