2019.29 Released

After tremendous effort of all involved, specifically Samantha McVey, Kane Valentine and Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev, there is a new Rakudo Perl 6 Compiler Release: 2019.07. This release is the result of over 4 months of development (Facebook comments).

Claudio Ramirez immediately followed this up with packages for quite a number of different Linux distributions (usage instructions).

Since this is the first release that uses the completely new, revamped build system (by Vadim Belman and Patrick Böker), it is expected that some issues may still become apparent in the coming weeks. Please bear with us while the Perl 6 Programming Language is getting an industrial strength build system.

Madeline still on a roll

Madeleine Goebel has been very busy and reports on her substantial progress on her GSOC project in Flags and Syscalls and Modules, Oh My!. She promises another blog post during the week because this one was getting too long.

Sparrow6 Released

Alexey Melezhik has announced that the Perl 6 version of Sparrow has been released to CPAN! Which is the result of a 6-month project.

A Clean Start

Jeff Goff has restarted his blog site “The Perl Fisher”, in which he will take a slightly different approach to blog posting about grammars than before.

Basic NativeCall

Andrew Shitov has published a blog post titled “Basic usage of NativeCall in Perl 6, in which he gives an introduction to NativeCall, the Perl 6 technology that allows you to call C functions from your Perl 6 code.

A Perl 6 Webring

cygx decided it is time to party like it’s 1999 with an old-style Webring, dedicated to Perl 6. It has four sites so far.

Grammar Talk at PerlCon

Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ will be giving a presentation about parsing grammars at PerlCon in Riga. He’s made his presentation notes available so that people can spot any errors with regards to Perl 6 grammars beforehand (Reddit comments).

Perl Weekly Challenge

This week’s blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #17:

• Perl Weekly Challenge # 17: Ackermann Function and Parsing URLs by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Ackermann Challenge by Aaron Sherman (Reddit comments).
• Up, up and Away! by Veesh Goldman (Reddit comments).
• Multitudinal Uniform Resource Parsing – Perl weekly challenge, week 17 by Francis Whittle.
• Perl Weekly Challenge: Week 17 by Jaldhar H. Vyas.
• Ackerman, URL and Perl 6 by Arne Sommer.

Damian Conway repeated his look back on the challenge of the previous week with an excellent blog post titled “Vigenère vs Vigenère.

Meanwhile, Challenge #18 is up for your perusal!

Core developments

• Ticket status of the past week.
• Ben Davies fixed a bug in pointer arithmetic for inlined CArrays in CStruct and CPPStruct REPRs.
• Gerd Pokorra found and fixed a problem in the configuration process.
• Timo Paulssen improved the error message when a process fails to be spawned and fixed various confprog issues.
• Jonathan Worthington fixed a combinatorial explosion in deopt logging, that could cause the spesh thread to block an application for multiple seconds. He also fixed various issues in profiling / coverage / debug code, specifically in multi-threaded code.
• Daniel Green JITted several unicode related opcodes.
• Patrick Böker fixed several build problems, specifically one on the GCC 5 compiler. And he added documentation on doing binary releases.
• Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev added a support script to manage Github releases.
• Chloé Kekoa fixed a problem with string interpolation using { }.
• Stefan Seifert fixed a race issue involving meta-ops that could cause segfaults in the worst case.
• And quite a few smaller fixes and improvements.

Questions about Perl 6

• Trouble using the cro command-line tool as documented by zb226.
• Has anyone ported a Par Packer equivalent to Perl 6? by kkrev.
• Some very strange performance issues in given/when/if by Aaron Sherman.
• Debian packages up-to-date? by Ilja Leedulane.
• Implementing iterable classes with the Iterable and Iterator roles by uzlxxxx.
• Capture and execute multiline code and incorporate result by Suman Khanal.
• Regex assertions working only in lookahead and lookbehind fashion by JJ Merelo.
• Trying to create cached dynamic methods, but confused by Aaron Sherman.
• Read raw keyboard on Windows by José Lula Livre X..
• P6opaque, Str vs simple Str types — follow up by lisprogtor.
• min and max of mixed Str and Int arguments by lisprogtor.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• A Progress Report by The Perl Shop.
• Add a Perl 6 Section by JJ Atria.
• Watch the talk (no pressure, eek!) by Curtis “Ovid” Poe.
• Still not fully implemented by Sébastien Douche.
• Text::LDIF into Cro::LDAP by Alexander Kiryuhin.
• Pulp! by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• Don’t need to worry about calculation errors by 八雲アナグラ.
• Want to give back by Tyler Limkemann.
• Day 1 of “Arabic” Perl 6 module by Khaled 🐫, 🐧& 🦋.
• Concurrently safe by Rebecca Turner.
• Solved in Perl 6 by inamori.
• Tired by technopagan.
• Too deep to know by 可視性 Enumeration.
• Mature regular expressions by halvarflake.
• Do what you want by ryn1x.
• Sigils make it easier by that guy who always replies “nice” to 69.
• Both hemispheres by ryn1x.
• Hell, no by Michael Mburu.
• Marxist language by Pannekoek.
• Easier to read regexes by wint: you can (not) program.
• Get the Community Edition by JJ Merelo.
• On categorize by Khaled 🐫, 🐧& 🦋.
• Lack of clarity by Alasdair Allan.
• It’s getting there by Rob Myers.
• On a phone by Æþer Portal.
• You will want to write them by 硫​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​酸​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​鶏@バ先募.
• Try googling by Мима Даликов.
• Really compelling by Sean Gold.
• Faster implementation by Simon Proctor.
• No more random gibberish by Simon Proctor.
• Seems to be a dead end as well by Edsger Lin.
• Swapping grammars dynamically by Nika Layzell.
• Running on 2019.07 by Lance Wicks.
• Back to green by JJ Merelo.
• Improve it for you! by Jonathan Worthington.
• Inheritanc vs composition by Jonathan Worthington.
• Creating code from a database schema by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• Bird, like inspec and goss by Alexey Melezhik.
• Flip it! by Jonathan Stowe.
• Better still by MaMo.
• unicomb? by Khaled 🐫, 🐧& 🦋.
• Working files! by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• All PR’s addressed by JJ Merelo.
• Pandoc in Perl 6 by Æþer Portal.
• Nativecall works! by Tyler Limkemann.
• DOSed my own computer by Jonathan Stowe.
• Easy and straightforward by Joelle Maslak.
• On your Ferrari? by memorystomp.
• Compile to ELF! by 八雲アナグラ.
• Putting bytecode into a C program by 八雲アナグラ.
• Trying out Z-tools by 八雲アナグラ.

Meanwhile on Facebook

• Sneaked into my dissertation by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch.

Perl 6 in comments

• Managing teardown by Ralph Mellor.
• A language in its own right by pushpop.
• Perl 6-ification? by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• On forgiving parsers by Ralph Mellor.
• Why it’s okay for Perl 6 to have “Perl” in its name. by Shred_Alert.
• Relational operators in pattern matching by Ralph Mellor.
• Jumped the shark by mcdermott.
• On resuming by Ralph Mellor.

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

• Matrix::Bot::Plugin::AutoAcceptInvites by Patrick Spek.
• Sparrow6 by Alexey Melezhik.

Updated modules:

• App::MoarVM::ConfprogCompiler by Timo Paulssen.
• Matrix::Bot by Patrick Spek.
• Tomtit, Sparrowdo by Alexey Melezhik.
• Gnome::Gdk3, Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• Failable by Ben Davies.
• ProcStats by Steven Lembark.
• Async::Workers by Vadim Belman.

Winding Down

With another heatwave coming up on many of the places where people work with Perl 6, yours truly hopes everybody will be able to survive. Please check in again next week for more Perl 6 news!