2018.14 A Perl 6 IDEA

Jonathan Worthington and his Edument team have announced an Integrated Development Environment for Rakudo Perl 6 named Comma, based on the JetBrains IDEA platform. And this is no April Fool’s joke (unlike the previous version of this edition of the Perl 6 Weekly). Check out the features, the FAQ, roadmap and Reddit comments. Exciting times indeed!

Larry in the Wild

It appears that Larry Wall will be giving a presentation titled “It’s the End of the World as We Know It, and I Feel Fine” at the Academic IT Festival in Cracow, Poland on 5-7 April. Too bad this overlaps with the German Perl Workshop (4-6 April) otherwise yours truly would have had a compelling reason to finally visit Cracow.

Core Developments

• Ticket status of past week.
• Jonathan Worthington provided support for the PID of the asynchronously running process in Proc::Async. Elizabeth Mattijsen made the same feature available to Proc.
• Timo Paulssen changed the interface of the nqp::getrusage op so that it uses a given native integer array, rather than create a new one each time nqp::getrusage is called. This significantly lowered the number of allocations for the supervisor thread.
• Jonathan Worthington also made Supply.interval a serial Supply (which it should have been from the start). And he fixed a pesky rooting bug in MoarVM, which resolved more than a handful bug reports.
• Zoffix Znet introduced a fails-like in Test.pm6, with semantics similar to throws-like, but for Failures rather than Exceptions.
• Bart Wiegmans fixed some spesh related issues.
• Jeremy Studer made List cmp List about 17x faster.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen did many micro-optimizations that may or may not be visible in your code. She also implemented Array.grab with semantics similar to Array.pick but actually immediately removing the value from the Array. She did the same for native arrays.
• And many other smaller fixes and improvements.

Blog Posts

• I can’t seem to install anything by elbitjusticiero.
• Nano syntax highlighting for Perl 6. by Alexey Melezhik.
• Perl no longer supported in Google Code Jam by choroba.
• Why is Perl becoming unpopular compared to other languages? by Alex Jones.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• The new resty tool by agentzh.
• ASCII → Unicode by Zoffix Znet.
• Cro 0.7.4 is released by croservices.
• Sign me up! by Zoffix Znet.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Cannot resolve caller sqlite3_bind by Jonathan Dewein.
• What’s the equivalent method of __init__? by chenyf.
• Can a shared Supply run multiple tap blocks simultaneously? by brian d foy.
• Creating a new file descriptor from stdout with fcntl fails in files by Ben Davies.
• react uses a single thread when processing a Channel by JJ Merelo.
• What does ^5 (caret + number) mean? by Stefanus.
• Array vs. List data type? by Stefanus.
• How to handle varargs with NativeCall by Ben Davies.
• Difference between print, put and say? by Stefanus.
• A method for checking substring matches? by Stefanus.
• How to find number of matches to regexp? by Daniel.
• Benchmarking using prime numbers by petre.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• JJ Merelo:
  

  We just reached 600 questions with the tag Perl6 in StackOverflow. My own experience says that in a few hours you usually have excellent answers by Brad, Jonathan, brian d foy, Elizabeth, and many others. However, we need more questions; I need not tell you that one question a day in Stack Overflow is a drop in the water; so please as soon as you bump into some little trouble just go there and ask away. Answers help us improve documentation, and we are all enriched by the experience. Will we be able to reach The Number of The Beast before the end of May? (that would effectively double the going asking rate).

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Debating on writing Editline bindings by Ben Davies.

Perl 6 in comments

• If not for those meddling kids by sdenton4.
• Typing and Signatures by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• So much good stuff by ogniloud.
• Unary plus in Perl 6 by Patrick Spek.
• Reappropriate the Perl brand by Peter Rabbitson.
• Number crunching too slow by petre.
• Gradual typing support by FractalLP.
• Perl 6 on Javascript is real by Brent Laabs.

Perl 6 Modules

6 New Modules:

• Proc::InvokeEditor by Simon Proctor.
• Lingua::Stopwords by Christian Sánchez.
• Algorithm::NaiveBayes by Itsuki Toyota.
• Lingua::Pangram by Stefan Fischer.
• Algorithm::Manacher by Itsuki Toyota.
• Lingua::Lipogram by Stefan Fischer.

11 Updated Modules:

• LibGit2 by Curt Tilmes.
• Hash::Merge by Patrick Spek.
• PDF::Class by David Warring.
• Config by Patrick Spek.
• App::Assixt by Patrick Spek.
• Image::QRCode by Fernando Santagata.
• Algorithm::Evolutionary::Simple by JJ Merelo.
• Algorithm::AhoCorasick by Itsuki Toyota.
• Font::FreeType by David Warring.
• Chart::Gnuplot by Itsuki Toyota.
• Algorithm::MinMaxHeap by Itsuki Toyota.

Winding Down

I think that the way Jonathan Worthington has set up Comma will work better than several other Kickstarter-like projects, because it will deliver something from the start. Can’t wait to actually get my hands on Comma. And for me, as a staunch vim user, that’s saying a lot. See you next week!