2018.27 Surveyed

The first Perl 6 Survey is over. There was quite a discussion on the applicability of many options on FaceBook and other places. The 220 responses produced a raw result for which JJ Merelo created a front page and some nice graphs from the raw data as well:

• Documentation score versus time using Perl 6
• Issues with Perl 6 versus time using Perl 6
• Perl 5 use versus age

Conference Season

The Dutch Perl Workshop will be held coming weekend in Arnhem, the Netherlands! The following Perl 6 related presentations will be given on Saturday:

• 10 things I’ve learned working with Perl 6 documentation‎ by JJ Merelo.
• Improving Perl 6 module development with assixt‎ by Patrick Spek.
• Hardening Perl 6’s Hash Implementation Against Attack‎ by Samantha McVey.
• The Future of Perl is Here‎ by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

On Sunday, there will be a Hackathon (with a slight Perl 6 bias) as well as an Introduction to Perl 6 workshop given by Andrew Shitov. Registration is still open!

In a few weeks time, the (European) Perl Conference in Glasgow will take place. This also will have workshops, like Introduction to Perl 6 by Jeff Goff. And it will have the following Perl 6 related presentations:

• Writing a Perl 6 Module by Herbert Breunung.
• Releasing a Perl 6 Module‎ by Herbert Breunung.
• Building a web app with Perl 6 and Cro‎ by Lance Wicks.
• 10 things I’ve learned working with Perl 6 documentation‎ by JJ Merelo.
• Concurrent evolutionary algorithms with Perl 6‎ by JJ Merelo.
• TestML – Data Driven Testing for Perl 5, Perl 6 and beyond‎ by Ingy döt Net.
• Perl 6: Signatures, Types and Multimethods‎ by Simon Proctor.

And here also: registration is still open!

Squashathon Time Again

This Saturday (7 July ± 12 hours) will be the next Squashathon again, with the emphasis on Perl 6 documentation. All help will be deeply appreciated!

Learn Perl 6 in Y minutes

One of the first Perl 6 introductions (on Learn X in Y Minutes), namely Where X=perl6, now also has a Spanish version. Kudos to uzl for this work!

More Perl 6 Benchmarks

Shlomi Fish has started a repo for Euler problems based benchmarks (try saying that 10x in a row).

Blog Posts

• The start of the GraalVM / Truffle experiment by Paweł Murias.
• ParrotVM what happened to it? by Logo4poop.
• How Viable is Perl? by Tim King (Reddit comments).
• I submitted a “Language Request” for Perl 6! Hopefully it can garner some support and get added to repl.it! by urrieda1990 (Reddit comments).
• Final Grant Report: Curating and improving Perl 6 documentation by Mark A. Jensen.
• Perl 6 nano syntax highlighting by Naoum Hankache.
• GraalVM / Truffle backend update by Paweł Murias.

Core Developments

• Ticket status of last week and the month of June.
• The 2000-issue barrier has been broken for the Rakudo repository. That same barrier was broken last month for the Perl 6 documentation, by the way.
• Jeremy Studer and Ben Davies added many JIT expression templates. It looks that the original author of the JIT expression template mechanism (Bart Wiegmans) is now in a minority! Which is a good thing, as it increases the Bus Factor!
• Samantha McVey continued working on speeding up the underlying implementation of hashes in MoarVM.
• Jonathan Worthington continued his work on refactoring the way scalars work and get optimized in MoarVM.
• Bart Wiegmans fixed an issue with the JIT on Windows.
• Tom Browder made sure that newlines are preserved in pod input and output blocks.
• Zoffix Znet slew a load of bugs related to metaop-assign, and made sure it optimizes better.
• Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev added a core developer helper tool to consistently report speed improvements on code.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made .first and .first(:end) about 2x as fast. She also fixed .perl roundtripping on Set|Bag and Mix as well as updates on very large BagHash values.
• And many smaller fixes and improvements.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Another Happy user by Zoffix Znet.
• Excellent module to create your next web application by JJ Merelo.
• 6.d release party? by Zoffix Znet.
• % for separators is brilliant by Joelle Maslak.
• TPCiSLC videos by The Perl Shop.
• Precompile custom operators by Zoffix Znet.
• Porting back to Perl 5 by Joelle Maslak.
• Ecosystem Citation Index by Zoffix Znet.
• 220 answers! by JJ Merelo.
• Moving in the right direction by Zoffix Znet.
• Raw Survey Data by Zoffix Znet.
• First Analysis by JJ Merelo.
• Some processed data by JJ Merelo.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• linux.conf.au 2019 ? by Norman Gaywood.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• How to create a class that doesn’t inherit from any other class? by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Making an observable timer by Mikkel.
• Getting data out of Native pointers by JJ Merelo.
• Trying to manage $*REPO at runtime by Steven Lembark.
• grep like program in parallel by Xin Cheng.
• Strange message declaring a Pointer[void] in a NativeCall module by Fernando Santagata.
• How do I declare a hash of hashes of numbers? by mscha.

Meanwhile on PerlMonks

• NES disassembly by holyghost.
• Hopfield Neural Network by holyghost.
• It has been suggested to rename Perl 6 in order to boost its marketing potential. Which name would you prefer? (poll) by martin (FaceBook comments).

Perl 6 in comments

• Starting to grow a JIT by liveoneggs.
• Majority is just loading Perl 6 by bdgills.
• “The Perl 6 …” by 3rdAccount.
• Fantastic! by Jo Christian Oterhals.

Perl 6 modules

New Modules:

• Net::Ethereum by Konstantin Narkhov.
• RDF::Turtle by Brian Duggan.
• Vroom::Reveal by Jeff Goff.
• Sparrowdo::Azure::Web::Cert by Alexey Melezhik.
• InterceptAllMethods by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Object::Trampoline by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Modules:

• FindBin by Steven Lembark.
• IP::Random by Joelle Maslak.
• Text::BorderedBlock by Patrick Spek.
• Amazon::DynamoDB by Sterling Hanenkamp.

Winding Down

If you’re looking for warm and sunny weather, be sure to join us at the Dutch Perl Workshop. With around 30 degrees Celsius, it’s going to be a hot one. If we don’t see you there, we’ll see you again with next week’s Perl 6 Weekly!