Heince Kurniawan has created an Indonesian translation of Naoum Hankache‘s Perl 6 Introduction, which gives you a quick overview of the Perl 6 programming language, enough to get you up and running (Reddit comments). This now brings the total of translations to 11: Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish and now Indonesian. I wonder if more than half of the world’s population can now learn about Perl 6 in their native language!
Squashathon Results
This weekend saw yet another Squashaton, this time with a focus on tickets that needed tests. Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev gave an overview of the results. And there is also an all-time overview of past, present and future Squashatons!
Rational Grant Proposal
Zoffix Znet has submitted a grant proposal entitled “Bugfixing and Performance of Rationals Fixing Constraints on Constants” to the Perl Foundation (Twitter announcement). Please be sure you read his plans and let TPF know what you think of it! Yours truly supports this grant request wholeheartedly.
Upcoming Perl Workshops
- The 14th French Perl Workshop will be held on 18/19 May 2018 in Paris. You can still register a Presentation!
- The 14th Dutch Perl Workshop will be held on 7 July 2018 in Arnhem. Prices vary from 75 euro to 400 euro with free access for attendees with limited financial means. Everybody is invited to give a presentation.
- The Swiss Perl Workshop 2018 will be held on 7/8 September in Bern. Here you can also still submit a talk proposal!
All of these events can use volunteers and sponsors. Please contact the organisers if you would like to help in such a capacity.
Core Developments
- Ticket status of past week (with no more tests marked as “test needed” thanks to the Squashathon).
- Samantha McVey significantly improved the collapsing of strands (the parts that make up a string on MoarVM), which e.g. happens when parsing a regex. This is now 4x faster by taking advantage of SIMD instructions. Also indexing has been made 50% faster when the needle is internally stored with a different number of bits than the haystack.
- Zoffix Znet worked a lot on the efficiency of
Nums and improving associated error messages. He also fixed a crash that would occur in some situations where a loop would have both aFIRSTas well as aLASTphaser. And he madedispatch:<var>at least 7x faster (such as in*.&uc). And exceptions that happen inENDare now shown with their backtrace. - Jonathan Worthington reduced the number of allocations in a number of situations, fixed an error with
.native-descriptoron closed handles and fixed a problem that prohibited building of MoarVM on big-endian systems. - Elizabeth Mattijsen improved the performance of native arrays with regards to initialization, iterating and the use of
.splice. She also improved the efficiency of.rollin many situations. - And many other smaller fixes and improvements.
Blog Posts
- Best way to run a hybrid program between two Perls? by elbitjusticiero.
- Implementing
Int.sleep()by Andrew Shitov. - Perl Developer Survey 2018 by Built in Perl (Reddit, PerlMonks comments).
- Superscripts by Andrew Shitov.
- 20th German Perl Workshop – Report by Mohammad Anwar.
- Keys, values, etc. of hashes by Andrew Shitov.
- Things I learned at the German Perl Workshop 2018 by Thomas Klausner.
- Perl Faces Uncertain Future: TIOBE Index by Nick Kolakowski (Reddit comments).
- Typed hashes by Andrew Shitov.
Videos
No videos from the German Perl Workshop just yet. But there is one from a recent London Perl Mongers meeting:
- Perl 6 Signatures by Simon Proctor.
Meanwhile on Twitter
- Sign me up by Zoffix Znet.
- Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to Perl 6 by Jeff Goff.
- Same as last year by Zoffix Znet.
- Taketh away by Zoffix Znet.
- Submodules bite again by Zoffix Znet.
- One more test by JJ Merelo.
- Deep in the bowels by Zoffix Znet.
Meanwhile on StackOverflow
- Is there an infix version for routine invocation? by JJ Merelo.
- Data Access Layer with
DBIishby Jonathan Dewein. - How do I declare a class attribute as a union of class names? by WindWhizzler.
- More concise way to setup defaults for regex by p6steve.
urlopenmethod? by chenyf.- Simplest way to split string on equal parts by Kate Page.
- What are
callwithandsamewithsupposed to do? by Christopher Bottoms. - Is there a way to get the
Poddeclarator block that is attached to a specific multi sub candidate? by Enheh.
Meanwhile on FaceBook
- Wendy van Dijk:
There’s a new Perl 5 book and it is written by Laurent Rosenfeld. It’s in French and it’s self-published. Kudos! (I got a signed copy and proud as hell): Programmation fonctionnelle en Perl: Améliorez la puissance expressive de vos programmes. Oh, and by the way, this is the first time anybody anywhere wrote & published a Perl 6 book first (Think Perl 6), and after that a Perl 5 book. Also, one book in English, and then a book in French.
- Jeff Goff:
ANTLR4::Grammarv0.5.0 released – it translates 45 of the grammars in the corpus to valid Perl 6 grammars. The next few releases will be making sure the grammars correspond to the original.
Meanwhile on perl6-users
- Using
BagHashes by mimosinnet.
Meanwhile on PerlMonks
- Perl Developer Survey 2018 by H.Merijn Brandt.
Perl 6 in comments
- Comma.
- Production ready by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
- Linguist discussion wrt Perl 6 pod.
Perl 6 Modules
New Modules:
- Lingua::Palindrome by Stefan Fischer.
Updated Modules:
- Algorithm::LibSVM by Toyota Itsuki.
- XML::XPath by Martin Barth.
- PDF::Class by David Warring.
- App::FindSource by araraloren.
- ANTLR4::Grammar by Jeff Goff.
Winding down
Quite a busy week for yours truly again. Being at the excellent German Perl Workshop for 5 days sorta messes up your schedule. Fortunately there was plenty of WiFi and 4G to be able to do some work as well, especially at Saturday’s Hackathon. Two Perl 5 books were sold at the Perl swag booth ran by Wendy van Dijk. And more than 30 Perl 6 books! The times, they are a-changing. See you next week for even more changes!
Weekly changes in and around Raku (Née Perl 6) 
https://lwn.net is probably not monitored for perl6 comments, but interesting comment here:
https://lwn.net/Articles/751286/
To quote:
Posted Apr 9, 2018 10:56 UTC (Mon) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]
2 years after its first stable release, we’re using Perl 6 in production and installed from distro repositories. And we use it to extend an existing Perl 5 code base thanks to interoperability features.
2 years after Python 3’s first stable release, I couldn’t even install it from a distro repo. And 10 years after said release, I still can’t use it in combination with our existing Python 2 code.
I wonder what you use as base for your update comparison. Because at the 2 year mark, I’d call it a hands down victory for Perl 6 and we don’t know what the 10 year mark’s gonna be like. And anyway, I didn’t even know there was a contest.