2019.21 That’s Why

Damian Conway admits that he’s been quietly playing along with the Perl Weekly Challenge in a blog post titled Why I Love Perl 6. In it, he shows the true power of TIMTOWTDI. It sparked quite a few discussions: /r/perl6, /r/programming, Perl 6 Facebook group, Facebook and Lobsters.

Summer warming up

The Google Summer of Code project for Perl 6 has started. Please welcome Zhongnian Tao, Madeleine Goebel, Antonio Gámiz Delgado and Joel Schüller, who will be improving several aspects of Perl 6 over the summer! Please support them if they have questions (although such a request is really superfluous 🙂 ).

Controlling the Profiler

Timo Paulssen elaborates in A Close Look At Controlling The MoarVM Profiler about a small DSL called confprog that can be used to control what, when or where code profiling should take place in a running Perl 6 program (Reddit comments). It also contains a nice plug for Nadim Khemir‘s Data::Dump::Tree and some cat pictures.

Auto-clickable in the browser

Timo Paulssen also created a script to be used with GreaseMonkey (and the like) that will automatically make filenames with line numbers clickable, e.g. when browsing error reports on Github. See also screen shots: the blue parts are the auto-generated links.

Sparrow6 progress report

Alexey Melezhik reports on his progress moving the Sparrow ecosystem to Perl 6. It also introduces S6, a Sparrow6 command-line interface. A must read if you’re interested in Sparrow, or automation frameworks in general.

Result 0.2.0 breaking changes

Sam Gillespie announced breaking changes to his Result module, which introduces functional error handling in the same way that Rust does (Reddit comments).

Perl Weekly Challenge

Blog posts in Perl 6 for the Perl Weekly Challenge #9:

• Solving the Sparkpost Challenge by Joelle Maslak.
• Squares and Rankings by Laurent Rosenfeld Reddit comments).
• A unique square and rank by Francis Whittle.
• Square Numbers and Functional Programming in Perl by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Squared Ranking with Perl 6 by Arne Sommer.

Challenge #10 is up for your perusal!

Core developments

• Ticket status of the past week.
• Madeleine Goebel fixed a problem with shutting down a libuv event loop. Her first MoarVM commit of many to come!
• Samantha McVey added support for malloc_trim (to reduce MoarVM memory usage) on OS’s that support it.
• Vadim Belman continued his work on revamping the configuration process, Oleksii Varianyk and Kaz Wesley helped him with that.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen added a :check named parameter to EVAL, to only have the code compile, but not be executed. And she fixed an issue with initializing native arrays from arrays with deleted elements.
• Leon Timmermans fixed an issue that affected users that implement a RUN-MAIN.
• Tadeusz Sośnierz fixed a bug in Date.truncate-to.
• And some other improvements and fixes.

Questions about Perl 6

Crossed the 1100 Perl 6 questions mark on StackOverflow!

• Is whenever signal() in react block order dependent? by drclaw.
• What happens when different thread schedulers are used in the same react block? by Håkon Hægland.
• Array of objects by hythm.
• Why does open with :w and :append still overwrite the file? by Jessica Nowak.
• How can I better handle config files? by Ben Davies.
• Perl 6 on JVM, how? by sshaw_.
• Serial communication with Arduino by windows11llll.

Meanwhile on Facebook

• Ruby RSpec? by Jeff Goff.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Impressed by Cro by Joelle Maslak.
• Any languages for M? by JJ Merelo.
• What happened? by メカ酋長.
• No categories by JJ Merelo.
• #12000 in docs! by JJ Merelo.
• Go not flipping on Windows by Asíncrono.
• Until they perl-6’d it by cms, this hard gemlike flame.
• Clearer dereferencing by ひとり上手.
• Continuing along by Luc N. Vu.
• Interestingly Junction by Fadis.
• Review by experts by JJ Merelo.
• Time of grace by R.F.D. ♨温泉ねずみ.
• See you next year by Erez.
• To commitconf by JJ Merelo.
• Missing support by clifford the big red pawg.
• Meanwhile in another language by Keith Devens.
• Ruby RSpec in Perl 6 by Jeff Goff.
• Despair by こたつがめ.
• Glad I left by Joe Drago.
• Nice by Thomas Klausner.
• Something unicode-y by Zoffix Znet.
• Hard to go back by Timo Paulssen.
• Much to learn by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Always grateful by Pierre Chapuis.
• Rationals built-in by Alex Balhatchet.
• Cool languages by pablomartinez.
• Designed for a 100 years by Opensouthcode.
• How react works by Jonathan Worthington.
• Nice to be reminded by David E. Wheeler.
• Already coding for it by James Cuff.
• Need a new farsighted by Ted Davis.
• Probably can’t do this by Curtis ‘Ovid’ Poe.
• New Chocolatey package by brian d foy.
• In the same talk? by Manuel Cillero.
• Examples in 10 + 1 languages by JJ Merelo.
• Very Perlish explanation by The Perl Shop.
• New member submitted in Perl 6 by Mohammad S Anwar.

Perl 6 in comments

• A fusion reactor instead by Brent Laabs.
• About morphability of a language by Ralph Mellor.
• Very fond? by Ralph Mellor.
• Something Academia is missing? by Ralph Mellor.

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

• Seq::Bounded by Doug Schrag.
• Log::Timeline by Jonathan Worthington.
• Operator::dB by Owen Allsop.
• Sys::IP by Denis Kanchev.

Updated modules:

• Term::Form by Matthäus Kiem.
• FileSystem::Parent, FindBin::libs, FindBin by Steven Lembark.
• GTK::V3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• Getopt::Long by Leon Timmermans.

Winding Down

Damian Conway showing his face again in Perl 6 land, after having seemingly retired from Perl down under, made my day. Meanwhile, yours truly has been working on an API for profiling Perl 6 code. More on that next week. See you then!