2018.53 Goodbye PerlJam

This week saw the peaceful passing of Jonathan “Scott” Duff (aka perlpilot and PerlJam) at the much too early age of 47. Scott has been heavily involved with Perl 6 since at least the days of Pugs (as far as yours truly has been able to trace back).

Although he would have described his contributions to Perl 6 as small, they have been important in that they helped others to build further at the very early stages of Perl 6. Perhaps more importantly, from at least 2005 until last summer (when he became too ill), Scott has participated almost daily in discussions on the #perl6 IRC channel in the kind and supporting way that people who know him, appreciated him for.

He will be sorely missed. Scott: thanks for all the fish!

Scott on Facebook (Facebook users only) and the go fund me campaign of his family: all donations will be appreciated.

This year’s final Advent posts

Too late for last week’s Perl 6 Weekly:

• Calling Numbers Names by Luis Uceta.
• Tips and ideas for the Perl 6 Golf code by Andrew Shitov (Reddit comments).

Getting things done

An interaction about the use of grep and map on the #perl6 IRC channel made Alexey Melezhik realize that it would be handy to have such an example be made more accessible. He even has a little movie to show what that would look like.

Calling subs and typing

Elizabeth Mattijsen had the 9th article about migrating from Perl 5 to Perl 6 published on opensource.com: Calling subs and typing in Perl 6 (Reddit comments).

Squashathon time again

Next Saturday will see yet another Community Squashathon, this time focused on testing. And as usual, “Saturday” will be interpreted as “Saturday anywhere on Earth”, so it will be more like 47 hours worth of fixing, documenting and adding tests. Please join us in making sure we get Perl 6 even better tested than it already is!

Core Developments

Two weeks of core developments this time, as promised last week:

• Nicolas Georges fixed an issue with utf-16 encoding with regards to null-bytes.
• Timo Paulssen worked a lot on optimizations in MoarVM. He also made Carray[] about 2x as fast.
• Stefan Seifert fixed various segfaults in MoarVM, as well as spending a lot of time finding a pesky issue (with a 3 char fix) when building MoarVM on big endian systems. And he removed all of the old MAST writing infrastructure, which is no longer needed.
• Paweł Murias implemented all of the new read/write functionalities on Blob / Buf and added support for num32 and num64 on the Javascript backend.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen added blob8.read-bits/read-ubits and buf8.write-bits/write-ubits methods to read/write any sequence of bits in buffers.
• Nick Logan added a cache for distributions for the CompUnit::Repository::FileSystem backend, making the use of -I less sensitive to potentially large directories.
• And many other smaller bug fixes and improvements.

Questions about Perl 6

• Incorporate C library function with NativeCall by con.
• What’s the convention for when you offer an async variant of the same code? by Lars Dieckow.
• Why does :{} create a Hash[Mu,Any] object (and what is it and how does it compare to a normal Hash)? by Christopher Bottoms.
• spurt vs file handle by lisprogtor.
• Rules for barewords by JJ Merelo.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• 900+ questions! by JJ Merelo.
• Try how fast? by Rolf Stöckli.
• How to use Algorithm::LDA by The Perl Shop.
• Was released by Brad Gilbert.
• You’ll love… by JJ Merelo.
• Use it as a number by Brad Gilbert.
• Birthday present by The Perl Shop.
• Maths! by JJ Merelo.
• Issue driven development by JJ Merelo.
• Completed! by JJ Merelo.
• Alpine docker by JJ Merelo.
• Perl 6! by eli #80sRx.
• Took a while by Tom Metro.
• Quick Reference by JJ Merelo.
• Take on adventures by Aurora 🍪 35C3.
• A good companion by JJ Merelo.
• RED doing string searches by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• The best pizzeria by Daniel Beck.
• Rakudo specific? by Ralph Mellor.
• Documentation Docker by JJ Merelo.
• An interesting tool by brian d foy.
• Really nice! by ryn1x.
• Router configuring by Joelle Maslak.
• Say hello by JJ Merelo.
• Tired of cpp by Ankit Khare.
• QuasiQuoter by ArchLinuxUpdateInfo.

Meanwhile on Facebook

• At the 35C3 by Wendy van Dijk.
• Built on Raspberry Pi Zero W by Robert Eaglestone.
• Bored by Wendy van Dijk.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Pair colon-chains by yary.
• Slangs: extending package_declarator problem by Vadim Belman.
• Basic question about lexical binding in relationship with “listassignment” by Raymond Dresens.

Perl 6 in comments

• Unrestricted power by Raiph Mellor.
• Balanced with practical thinking by Ralph Mellor.
• Typechecking by b2gills.
• “conforms to spec” by Ralph Mellor.
• Not as huge by noir_lord.
• Semi-colons useful? by Ralph Mellor.
• Gets it right by sifoobar.
• Specialized in VM design by Ralph Mellor.
• Badly need a Perl 6 API by AlexCoventry.
• About quoting by xisukar.
• Can’t remove features by pjc50.
• Longest token match by Ralph Mellor.
• Constant propagationn by Ralph Mellor.
• Coloured glasses by Ralph Mellor.
• Whitespace in identifiers by Ralph Mellor.

Perl 6 modules

New Modules:
• PodCache::Module by Richard Hainsworth.
• Hash::Timeout by Fernando Santagata.

Updated modules:

• HTTP::Supply by Sterling Hanenkamp.
• StrictClass by Martin Barth.
• TAP by Leon Timmermans.
• Tomtit by Alexey Melezhik.
• Archive::Libarchive, Archive::Libarchive::Raw by Fernando Santagata.

Winding Down

A week with very mixed feelings. Be careful with any fireworks if you’re celebrating the New Year! Yours truly hopes to see you all and well reading the next Perl 6 Weekly!