2018.16 SO That!

JJ Merelo would like you to ask your Perl 6 question (also) on StackOvervlow, instead of just on the #perl6 IRC channel. Why?

Most questions are answered, and with a very good answer. And it stays there for ever, and they have good SEO mojo.

Which looks like a very good thing to yours truly.

rakudo.org gets a facelift

Zoffix Znet has been working on a new version of the rakudo.org website. This includes a downloads page with a much better user interface. Kudos!

WANTED – Perl 6 Historical Items

Zoffix Znet is also working on a facelift of the perl6.org website, and he needs your help.

The Perl 6 Programming Language Museum will be part of that effort and along with interesting tidbits of Perl 6 history, it’ll showcase past implementation attempts that may no longer be in active development today. Since I don’t know much about what happened before I came to the language sometime in 2015, I need your help in collecting those tidbits.

So if you know something, or you know someone who knows something, please see his blog post for details so that we can be sure that this bit of history will be preserved for posterity.

perl6.org in Chinese

Work has recommenced on translating the perl6.org website to Chinese. This effort could definitely use more eyes and hands. If you’re capable of helping out, then please do!

Core Developments

• Ticket status of past week.
• Timo Paulssen fixed an issue about the interaction of spesh and deserialization of constant values. He also made sure that valgrind and similar debugging tools produce less noise during global destruction.
• Samantha McVey made sure that MoarVM / nqp / Rakudo build on Solaris.
• Zoffix Znet fixed the precision / value drift on Complex literals, which is causing some ecosystem fallout because tests now fail because they check against a drifted value (see also Low Hanging Numeric Fruit).
• Tobias Leich (welcome back!) fixed a number of issues that NativeCall had when interfacing with C++ libraries.
• And many other smaller fixes and improvements.

Other Blog Posts

• my $x = $x by Andrew Shitov.
• Why do you have to be afraid of the programming language Perl 6? … or not. by Steffen Winkler (Reddit comments).
• LoneStar – A Bash application to install Rakudo Star on GNU+Linux by Patrick Spek (Reddit comments).

Meanwhile on Twitter

• A Great Idea by Zoffix Znet.
• Change Travis Perl 6 Environment by JJ Merelo.
• Understanding Repo Dynamics by JJ Merelo.
• First bug squashed by remote debugger by Zoffix Znet.
• JASYP18 Challenge in Perl 6 by JJ Merelo.
• Low Hanging Numeric Fruit by Zoffix Znet.
• Rare Data Race by Zoffix Znet.
• GPW Presentations by Jonathan Worthington.
• Language Design vs Packaging by Rebecca Turner.
• It’s got TLS! by Moritz Lenz.
• Great job! by JJ Merelo.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Can’t use colon pair in qqww or qqww:to struct by chenyf.
• Grammar.parse seems to loop forever and use 100% CPU by JJ Merelo.
• Does pattern match have guard clause? by chenyf.
• Portable Edition by SJOR.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Slides for “8 ways to do concurrency and parallelism in Perl 6”? by Norman Gaywood.
• awk? by ToddAndMargo.
• How do I do an integer divide? by ToddAndMargo.
• Does words have a delimiter? by ToddAndMargo.
• Latest Rakudo Star not found by Marcel Timmerman.

Meanwhile on PerlMonks

• Curious about Perl’s strengths in 2018 by Crosis.

Perl 6 in comments

• Practically a new language by mateuszf.
• Hands down by Stefan Seifert.
• They don’t really get away with it by BjoernKW.
• Serious problems by hyperpallum.
• Badly managed update by coliveira.
• No other living language by est.
• Brave enough by petre.
• Misleading Name by pavelbr.
• Hello Perl 6 by oblio.
• Interesting comparison by usernam223.
• Pretty much alive by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• “Perl 6 it” by oblio.
• Some day by bionoid.

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

• DBIx::NamedQueries by Mario Zieschang.
• List::MoreUtils by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Modules:

• Cache::Async by Robert Lemmen.
• PDF::Class by David Warring.
• ANTLR4::Grammar by Jeff Goff.
• Bailador by Martin Barth.
• Sub::Name, List::Util, Scalar::Util, Sub::Util,
  P5tie, Tie::Array, Tie::Hash, Tie::StdArray, Tie::StdHash, Sys::Hostname, P5times, P5pack, P5each, P5caller, P5lcfirst, P5ref, P5hex, P5chomp, P5chr, P5quotemeta, P5index, P5length, P5substr, P5lc, P5fc, P5-X, P5study, P5sleep and P5reverse by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Winding Down

The past week was quite exhausting for yours truly. Cancer sucks. Losing a family member to cancer, sucks. But life goes on. So see you next week for more news from the Perl 6 world!