2018.24 Discussion Redirect

Zoffix Znet took action on the news of last week that our old IRC log website was no longer in the air out of GDPR considerations. In a blog post entitled “How To Make Old #perl6 IRC Log Links Work” he explains how he wrote the algorithm to map references to the old log website to the secondary logger. After which Moritz Lenz added a smart redirect on the old log website to make things more convenient. Meanwhile, Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev has worked on making the same work for #moarvm, #perl6-dev and even previously-used #p6dev channels.

Spesh Plugins Merged

Jonathan Worthington merged his work on the MoarVM spesh plugin infrastructure, which started a good 6 weeks ago. In his blog post titled: Faster dispatches with MoarVM specializer plugins he explains the background, the problem, and how the new plugin structure will help optimizing in quite a few contexts (2.5x, 6.6x and 12x faster). All work that he’s doing as part of his most recent Perl Foundation grant.

Stack Hacking Improvements

The MoarVM internals work did not end with Jonathan’s work this week. Bart Wiegmans also published a blog post: Controlled Stack Hacking for the MoarVM JIT Compiler. He explains how a reorganization of some MoarVM internal data structures allows for much easier exception handling, reducing the memory footprint and general execution overhead as well.

Final Documentation Grant report

JJ Merelo has presented his Final Grant Report. Yours truly can only concur with the conclusions:

In general, I would say that the main objective of this grant, which was to improve the documentation, was achieved, not only by closing the outstanding issues, but also playing attention to channels where Perl 6 is mentioned and creating issues on the repo when it was needed.

And the additional reports that JJ Merelo has authored, are the icing on the very large cake!

Introduction to Application Development in Perl 6

Patrick Spek has sent in a Perl Foundation Grant Proposal to write a book about getting started with application development in Perl 6. Be sure to leave your comments!

Is Perl 6 faster than Perl 5 on average?

An interesting question on Reddit, with quite a few comments.

Running Perl 6 in Docker

Gabor Szabo shows how you can use a Docker image to run Perl 6 (Reddit comments).

Preliminary Schedule NLPW 2018

There’s a preliminary schedule for the coming Dutch Perl Workshop, on Saturday 7 July 2018 in Arnhem, The Netherlands. So far, the Perl 6 presentations are in a majority! And on Sunday 8 July, Andrew Shitov is going to give a whole day “Introduction to Perl 6 Workshop“.

Other Core Developments

• Ticket status of past week.
• This week saw the 29000th commit in the Rakudo repository.
• Jeremy Studer fixed an issue with the SIGBREAK signal on Windows.
• Daniel Green made the NQP static optimizer convert +@a to the faster nqp::elems(@a) transparently.
• Samantha McVey made maintenance of the ops / JIT expression templates easier by writing a support script that sorts them in the same order.
• 陈梓立 added a non-metaop !~~ in NQP and did some NQP grammar cleanups.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen added use isms 'Perl5' as a way to let Perl 6 allow certain Perl 5-like invocations (such as abs without parameters).
• Stefan Seifert continued his work on being able to write meta-models in Perl 6 (rather than NQP).
• And many other smaller fixes and improvements.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• First Keynote Speaker by Mark Keating.
• Only 7 days until the first tutorial! by IrishPebbles.
• How map desugars into foreach by Matt S Trout.
• Soft by Timo Paulssen.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• How to declare native array of fixed size? by annoying_squid.
• Where can I learn about Type variables (::T) by p6steve.
• Is it possible to embed Perl 6 in a C (or C++) program? by Andrew.
• Uninstantiable; Callable when using Callable variables from a trait declaration by JJ Merelo.
• “Two terms in a row” error by Mahadevan.
• Passing an inlined CArray in a CStruct to a shared library using NativeCall by Håkon Hægland.
• multi method new by wbn.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• JJ The Closer by JJ Merelo.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Need sort help by ToddAndMargo.

Perl 6 in comments

Not worried about obscurity by raiph.

You are doing it wrong by Reini Urban.

I am about to learn Perl 6 by haj.

Apologies if you’re not interested by raiph.

Implemented as Virtual Machines by jcrites.

Better tooling by smewp.

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

• WWW::vlc::Remote by Zoffix Znet.
• Trie by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.

Updated Modules:

• Magento by Sam Morrison.
• IConv by aloren.
• Desktop::Notify by Fernando Santagata.
• Inline::Perl5 by Stefan Seifert.

Winding Down

Quite a few very nice advancements this week! Some applications will see that more than others, at least the spectest seems to run about 1% faster. And that’s the worst case, as there’s not a lot of code there that runs repeatedly.

Which brings me to something that does repeat: the Perl 6 Weekly. So see you next week, live from The Perl Conference in Salt Lake City!