2018.20 Committed Through Time

JJ Merelo has published a Technical Report titled “Perl 6 documentation repository through time: contributions through commits” (PDF) in which he describes how contributions have been distributed throughout the repository history, and what kind of changes have been brought by the Perl Foundation grant and other events. One of the products of the Curating and improving Perl 6 documentation TPF grant (First Grant Report).

Core Developments

• Ticket status of past week.
• Jeremy Studer implemented an nqp::slice op, which was then used by Elizabeth Mattijsen to make native array range slices (like @a[^10]) about 23x faster, and .splice on native arrays up to 2x faster.
• Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer fixed the output of the X::OutOfRange exception on very large arrays.
• Christian Bartolomäus fixed various issues on the JVM backend again.
• Stefan Seifert optimized the array initialization from a large list of literal values so that the JVM backend does not have any problems with it anymore either (apparently there was a limit of 255 arguments).
• Daniel Green optimized some internal logic with regards to interpolating regexes into other regexes for a 30% speed increase in some cases.
• Zoffix Znet fixed an issue with the use of attributes in shape declarations.
• thundergnat made the stringification of Rats and FatRats up to 200x faster and fixed a number of issues along the way. FatRats can now be stringified to an arbitrary precision (although this will not happen by default, as that would break compatibility).
• Samantha McVey implemented a new algorithm for string searching for when strings are represented as 32bit values internally. This made this particular function 4x to 15x faster.
• Timo Paulssen fixed many small, but important issues in the MoarVM backend, related to GC and profiling.
• Bart Wiegmans made sure some more opcodes are getting the full JIT treatment on MoarVM.
• Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev removed some not-working / obsolete Perl 4/5 to Perl 6 error messages / warnings.
• And many other smaller fixes and improvements.

Blog Posts

• Announcing The London Perl Workshop 2018 by London Perl Workshop.
• Looking at the Lispy side of Perl by Marty Kalin (Reddit comments).
• What is Perl? How relevant it is and how to get started! by Akshay Balakrishnan (Reddit comments).
• Deconstructing Simple Grammars by Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer.
• TDD and Cro in Perl 6 land by Lance Wicks.
• The Perl Conference Newsletter: May 13, 2018 by IrishPebbles.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Chocolatey package for Rakudo Star 2018.04 by brian d foy.
• First TPF doc Grant report by JJ Merelo.
• Help with doc issues by JJ Merelo.
• Find indices of ‘a’ and ‘b’ by chenyf.
• Junctions as hash keys by chenyf.
• Enjoyed working in Perl 6 and Cro by Lance Wicks.
• Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to Perl 6 by ThePerlShop.
• Easily resolvable Perl 6 issues by Zoffix Znet.
• People I don’t recognize by Zoffix Znet.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• What’s the difference these two function calling conventions? by Kaiepi.
• Find last Friday’s Date? by chenyf.
• Find element index in an array by chenyf.
• How to create a data structure like a tree by Theo van den Heuvel.
• Multi sub by pcarrier.
• All subsets of a list by Eugene Barsky.
• How to edit the source code in module after installed it using zef? by chenyf.
• How to uninstall a module? by chenyf.
• WhateverStar `&&` WhateverStar by Håkon Hægland.
• How to extend a module by extending a class that it is using? by Håkon Hægland.
• How to autoload a module subroutine? by Håkon Hægland.
• Does Perl 6 have a class method equivalent to the MAIN sub? by Mikkel.
• Hash with Array values by Eugene Barsky.
• Indices for more than one needle by Eugene Barsky.
• Problems with Dateish strings by JJ Merelo.
• Reading from a bound pipe using Proc::Async by JJ Merelo.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• Help for Perl 6 Documentation by JJ Merelo.
• Perl 6 Resources Card by Peter Evans.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• I Need dir help by ToddAndMargo.
• I Need indir help by ToddAndMargo.
• Any better explanation of look ahead assertions by ToddAndMargo.
• Need -c help by ToddAndMargo.
• I need regex help by ToddAndMargo.
• Need help converting from Perl 5 by ToddAndMargo.

Perl 6 in comments

• Basically a completely different language by lenkite.
• Overriding language and type semantics by Reini Urban.
• Crazy waterfall design process by AlexCoventry.
• Too easy in Perl 6 by Brent Laabs.
• So whimsically fun by wongma.

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

• FanFou by ohmycloud.
• JSON::Stream by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Algorithm::Heap::Binary by cono.

Updated modules:

• P5rand, P5reset, P5built-ins, P5getpriority by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Algorithm::GooglePolylineEncoding by Simon Proctor.

Winding Down

Check in again next week for more Perl 6 news!