2018.31 Check Out Garbage

Timo Paulssen reported on his latest work (FaceBook comments) on the Perl 6 Performance Analysis Tooling Grant, this time mostly related on tracking the performance of the Garbage Collector in MoarVM. Although not ready for prime-time yet, this reports tantalizingly shows us things to come in the near future for the Rakudo Perl 6 profiler functionality.

On Scalar and opposite ends of Grants

Just before going on a well deserved holiday, Jonathan Worthington wrote another blog post about his latest work: Redesigning Rakudo’s Scalar. It explains how Scalar containers have evolved over the years, and how being able to handle them now as any other piece of Perl 6 code, will allow many future optimizations. This work concluded 200 hours of work on the grant extension request of last January. To make sure he can continue this excellent work, he has submitted another grant extension request to allow him to do another 200 hours. Comments on that new request are welcomed!

The Perl Conference in Glasgow

The schedule of The Perl Conference in Glasgow is now available for your perusal. It contains the following presentations that have at least some Perl 6 in them:

• 10 things I’ve learned with Perl 6 documentation by JJ Merelo.
• Perl 6 in Real Life $Work‎ by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• ‎Hardening Perl 6’s Hash Implementation Against Attack‎ by Samantha McVey.
• ‎Releasing a Perl 6 Module‎ by Herbert Breunung.
• Building a web app with Perl 6 and Cro‎ by Lance Wicks.
• Signatures, Types and Multimethods‎ by Simon Proctor.
• ‎TestML – Data Driven Testing for Perl 5, Perl 6 and beyond‎ by Ingy döt Net.
• In Conversation With Gloria Wall (News item)
• Concurrent evolutionary algorithms with Perl 6‎ by JJ Merelo.
• Writing a Perl 6 Module by Herbert Breunung.
• The Future of Perl 5 and Perl 6 by Curtis Poe.

And for those of you interested to get your feet a little more wet in Perl 6 than you have done so far, there are two whole day Perl 6 workshops to choose from (at a little extra cost):

• Introduction to Perl 6 by Jeff Goff.
• ‎Making your Perl 5 Modules work in Rakudo Perl 6‎ by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Hope to see you all in Glasgow, in just about 2 weeks from now!

Squashathon this weekend!

It being the first Saturday of the month again, there will be another Community Squashathon on 4 August (all timezones included), this month focussing on fixing failing tests of modules in the Perl 6 ecosystem. Please join us for free virtual pizza and hugs as we squash some bugs!

Presentations in Toronto

Zoffix Znet did not one, but 2 presentations at the last Toronto Perl Mongers meeting. Of both there are at least the slides and a screen cast available:

• Faster Perl 6 Programs (Reddit comments).
• Intro Into Perl 6 Regexes and Grammars (Reddit comments).

Alas, there is no video available of these presentations (yet).

No 2018.07 Rakudo Compiler Release

After much deliberation and discussion, it was decided to skip the 2018.07 Rakudo compiler release. As this release was supposed to become the base of the 2018.07 Rakudo Star Release, it was extra important that this Rakudo Perl 6 release would be stable enough. Unfortunately, some elusive issues have dragged out the release for the past 2 weeks or so already. And did not improve the trust in the stability of a 2018.07 Rakudo Compiler Release. So the release manager Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev made the difficult decision to skip this month’s release (knowing that the next release is planned less than 3 weeks away) and have all of the recent refactoring and improvements stew for a little more before giving the world a taste of it.

However, the release manager of Rakudo Star, Steve Mynott, does intend to release a Rakudo Star distribution, but based on the 2018.06 Rakudo compiler release. For which there are now Release Candidates available (.tar, .msi (for Windows) and .dmg (for macOS)). Please take the time to test these in your environment and let us know should you find any issues!

Other core developments

• Ticket status of last week.
• Samantha McVey added extensive testing for the SipHash hashing algorithm in MoarVM and slightly optimized the SipHash itself.
• Bart Wiegmans found the underlying issue that plagued MoarVM on Windows, and removed the offending commit for now.
• Jeremy Studer made it possible to slice NativeCall‘s CArrays just like any other Array.
• Zoffix Znet deprecated the environment variable RAKUDO_EXCEPTIONS_HANDLER in favour of PERL6_EXCEPTIONS_HANDLER. He also continued his work on preparing the 6.d release.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed a potential issue when wrapping a proto preventing it from getting optimized away. She also added support for does on attributes and made sure that `for` loops with an integer range consisting of sigilless constants, are also highly optimized.
• And various other smaller fixes and improvements.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Help Yourselves by Zoffix Znet.
• Sounds Familiar by Zoffix Znet.
• Perl 6 dojo by Simon Proctor.
• Another happy user by Zoffix Znet.
• A special pod commit by JJ Merelo.
• A compilation of my favorite Perl 6 talks by ryn1x.
• Pulled, but at TPCiG nonetheless by Jeff Goff.
• 39 / 500 by Zoffix Znet.
• Test-suite for BGP daemon in Perl 6 by Joelle Maslak.
• The right place by Zoffix Znet.
• ❤️ as delimiter by JJ Merelo.
• Ton of clarifications by Zoffix Znet.
• 6prove by Joelle Maslak.
• A rabbit hole by Joelle Maslak.
• Pleasure to ask Perl 6 stuff by JJ Merelo.
• Gateway Drug by Joelle Maslak.
• Doing two main things by Joelle Maslak.
• GraalVM / Truffle shows potential by Zoffix Znet.
• Finally p6env by Shoichi Kaji.
• Most used modules by JJ Merelo.
• Getting it to work by Simon Proctor.
• Final Poedown by Mark Keating.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• Also cuddling by Jeff Goff.
• A mere 39 left by Wendy van Dijk.
• Made it to the list! by Jeff Goff.
• A special pod commit by Wendy van Dijk.
• Mixing daemons by Andrew Shitov.
• A class project by John Stigleman.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• How to insert separators between columns? by chenyf.
• How to use abstract multi methods containing a where? by Patrick Spek.
• Converting Match object to string by MorayJ.
• Catching non-fatal exceptions in autovivification by lisprogtor.
• Does Baggy add (+) work on MixHash weights? by p6steve.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• -c bug to report by ToddAndMargo.
• > vs gt by ToddAndMargo.
• return code? by ToddAndMargo.
• What does ^parents really tell you? by Joseph Brenner.

Perl 6 in comments

• Perl 6 in Solus? by SvenMA.
• Hard to compare by Robert Lemmen.
• Finally showed in 2015 by gaxio.
• More string copying by b2gills.
• A special kind of class by b2gills.
• Did you try 6model? by minimim.
• More manageable with grammars by b2gills.
• More like a regular programming language by b2gills.
• Many computer science problems by b2gills.
• Revolving door of clowns by claydavisss.
• Coding with Mu by Juerd Waalboer.

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

• Injector by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Future by Sterling Hanenkamp.
• Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::DotNet, Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::MsBuild, Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Cordova by Alexey Melezhik.
• Adverb::Eject, Hash::LRU, Sub::Memoized by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Perl6::Ecosystem by JJ Merelo.
• Text::Names by ribbon-otter.
• CamelPub by Don Park.

Updated modules:

• PDF::Class by David Warring.
• IP::Random by Joelle Maslak.
• Perl6::Tidy by Jeff Goff.
• Hash::MultiValue, HTTP::Headers by Sterling Hanenkamp.
• Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Solution, Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::DotNet by Alexey Melezhik.
• Net::LibIDN2 by Ben Davies.
• Terminal::Spinners by Ryn1x.
• KHPH by Mark Devine.
• Ddt by Bahtiar Gadimov.
• Time::gmtime, Hash::Restricted by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Proc::InvokeEditor by Simon Proctor.
• Propius by Mikhail Khorkov.

Winding Down

Going into the 5th week of heatwave at where yours truly lives, it is sometimes hard to think, even with the airco on HIGH. Hope you all can manage the summer on the northern hemisphere in good health. See you again next week for more Perl 6 news!