2018.34 A Quick One From Tyndrum

While enjoying some touristic activities in the Northern parts of Scotland (well, North of Glasgow anyway), this Perl 6 Weekly comes from the town of Tyndrum. According to the Wikipedia article:

Thus unusually there are two stations serving the same small village, only a few hundred yards apart, but about 10 miles (16 km) apart by rail.

Which yours truly finds oddly descriptive of the situation in the Perl community: so close, yet seen as so far apart by some.

The Perl Conference in Glasgow

And what an excellent conference it was! And live-streamed as well all over the world. Some blog reports have already surfaced, all of them referencing Perl 6 in some form or another:

• The Perl Conference in Glasgow by Dave Cross.
• The European Perl Conference in Glasgow by Lance Wicks.
• The Perl Conference in Glasgow – Report by Mohammad S Anwar.
• My First Perl Conference by Sam Anderson.
• Perl is Perl by JJ Merelo.
• My First Perl Conference by Simon Proctor.

By next week, there will be separate videos for each presentation. Until then, you will have to do with the raw recorded live-streams.

Alas, not all things where hunky dory: Mark Keating issued a formal apology for things that had gone wrong (Reddit comments).

Other Blog Posts

• TIO are looking into installing Perl 6 modules incl. IP5! 🙂 Which modules would we like? by Ralph Mellor.
• I’m writing an ORM for Perl 6 and I’d love some comments by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Garbage Collection in Perl 6 by Elizabeth Mattijsen (Reddit comments).
• The first public release by Timo Paulssen.
• Macro’s and Perl 6 by bobthecimmerian.

Core Developments

Alas, too much R&R to dive into this with the appropriate amount of depth and precision. Hopefully next week a 3-week overview.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• More complaints about Camelia by Joelle Maslak.
• Riga Again! by Kenichi Ishigaki.
• 56 minutes by Joelle Maslak.
• JJ Broke Everything by Granada PM4.
• It’s working! by Zoffix Znet.
• Incrementing a Camel by Joelle Maslak.
• The Book Cover by brian d foy.
• $a == 1 && $a == 2 && $a == 3 by Andrew Shitov.
• Massive Camelia by Sam Anderson.
• In Production by Joelle Maslak.
• 1300 issues closed by JJ Merelo.
• Receiving a BGP open by Joelle Maslak.
• Never Do That by Moritz Lenz.
• A different point of View by JJ Merelo.
• Not yet by JJ Merelo.
• Filling in details by The Perl Shop.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• Olga Kovalska++ by Wendy van Dijk.
• I didn’t know Perl  could do that! by Jeff Goff.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Sub MAIN / command line Parsing by Beuss.
• Why don’t new operator definitions persist in the REPL? by Daniel Mita.
• More concise way to build a configuration class using environment variables? by wbn.
• How to add an attribute to an object using the meta-object protocol? by Håkon Hægland.

Meanwhile on PerlMonks

• The Future of Perl 5 by Laurent Rosenfeld (Reddit comments).

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• I need the rules for running modules from the command line by ToddAndMargo.
• How do I test my substitutions? by ToddAndMargo.
• Perl 6 POSIX IEEE Std 1003.1 by Mark Devine.
• Curious effects in debugging by Theo van den Heuvel.
• How do I write this? by Todd Chester.
• Tip: grep and sed stopped working by Todd Chester.

Perl 6 in comments

• Rebranding won’t gain much by bobthecimmerian.
• Arcane examples by Zoffix Znet.
• Nice built-in CLI construction by slobotron.
• Works well with all programming styles by kamaal.
• More verbose and slower by Ralph Mellor.
• Gently scales up by Ralph Mellor.
• Just going to leave this here by MattEOates.
• So dead that they can not even move into a better perl by shevegen.

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

• Range::SetOps, Trait::Env by Simon Proctor.
• Array::Circular by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Term::ReadKey by Jonas Kramer.
• Sparrowdo::Cordova::OSx::Build by Aleksei Melezhik.

Updated Modules:

• AttrX::Mooish by Vadim Belman.
• Sparrowdo, Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Cordova by Aleksei Melezhik.
• Test::HTTP::Server by Simon Proctor.

Winding Down

Having done a whole-day workshop + a last-minute presentation has taken a lot of energy from your truly. Good thing the weather cooperated for a time by being typical late-summer weather for Glasgow. Please check in again next week for more Perl 6 news!

Advertisements

2018.33 A Quick One From Glasgow

Greetings from the city that will host The (European) Perl Conference this week. A lot colder and wetter than yours truly got used to the past 6 weeks. It takes a little getting used to.

FOSDEM 2019 – Call for Speakers

Wendy van Dijk has issued a Call for Speakers for the Perl DevRoom at next year’s FOSDEM in Brussels (2/3 February 2019). This would be a good time to send in your Perl 6 related talk proposals!

Blog Posts

• Why I still think Camelia is a mistake by Benji.
• Small stuff #5: Gather around, it’s time to get lazy (…but why?) by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• The 100 Day Plan: The Update on Perl 6.d Preparations by Zoffix Znet.
• Small stuff #6: Century — a new name for a hundred-year language? by Jo Christian Otherhals.
• Building Cordova packages for UWP using VSTS and Sparrowdo by Alexey Melezhik.
• Perl 6 By Example by Benjamin Frady (Reddit comments).

Core Developments

More about that next week when yours truly is less tired.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Grammar rule auto-complete by Jonathan Worthington.
• Materiel de promotion de Perl 6 by Mongueurs de Perl.
• Same thing in Perl 6 by Zoffix Znet.
• Interesting paper on OSR by Jonathan Worthington.
• Obvious in hindsight by Jonathan Worthington.
• Writing single core apps is silly by Zoffix Znet.
• Happy? Or not so much? by Zoffix Znet.
• Not so random Perl 6 by Moritz Lenz.
• Toasting very widely by Zoffix Znet.
• Still makes my day by JJ Merelo.
• Marketing alias info by Zoffix Znet.
• Cpannican view by The Perl Shop.
• Interesting by Simon Proctor.
• Isn’t widespread enough to recommend by ryn1x.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• Thank you by Wendy van Dijk.
• At Wacken by Wendy van Dijk.
• Nice series of blogs by Wendy van Dijk.
• Cloud Perl 6 Interpreter by Chris Jack.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Changing $*DISTRO values for testing by JJ Merelo.
• Changing a class variable from outside the class by JJ Merelo.
• List repetition (xx) without evaluation? by Jo King.
• Why Rakudo Star for Windows still compiled/linked for exact FS locaton (c:\rakudo)? by gapsf.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Force integers in an array? by ToddAndMargo.
• string to integer? by ToddAndMargo.
• Why use dd to convert a string to an integer? by ToddAndMargo.
• RE: return code? by Mark Devine.
• Is there a limit to a s/? by ToddAndMargo.
• Data::Dump::Tree maintenance by JJ Merelo.
• Making sure Perl 6 is in all of the Wikipedia examples articles by Benji.
• Special token names, or my mistake by yary.

Perl 6 in comments

• A piece of sample code by athenot.
• Already taken by Roboprog.
• Fibonacci sequence, with cache by Zoffix Znet.
• Fix it permanently. Like Perl 6 by kamaal.
• So many cool things by Mutant321.
• Subclassing a grammar – a bit crazy by dan-robertson.
• Future versions of macro’s by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• From a Perl 67 flyer by grokify.
• Without having to parse “another language” by setr.
• Similar to Perl 6 by hpcjoe.
• Fun Fact by Dave Rolsky.

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

• AttrX::Mooish by Vadim Belman.
• Attribute::Predicate, Method::Also by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Modules:

• DateTime::DST, GetOpt::ForClass, Amazon::DynamoDB by Sterling Hanenkamp.
• CamelPub by Don Park.
• Test::HTTP::Server by Simon Proctor.
• MeCab by Itsuki Toyota.
• PDF::Class, HTML::Canvas by David Warring.
• Digest::BubbleBabble by Ben Davies.
• Async::Command by Mark Devine.
• Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Cordova by Aleksei Melezhik.

Winding Down

As predicted last week, this week’s Perl 6 Weekly is slightly later and smaller than usual. Hopefully next week yours truly will have more time while feeling better. So, see you next week!

2018.32 Squashathon Done

This weekend’s Squashathon was the best Squashathon so far: 29 contributors have worked on 276 issues of the 314 issues that were found with modules in the Perl 6 ecosystem. At the moment of this writing, only 24 remained open. Fortunately, many of the issues were uninstalled native library issues. Installing the native library in many of the cases, solved the problem that the ecosystem toaster had found. But other cases were much more problematic and needed a lot of research.

Most of the preparatory work was done by Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev, kudos for that! And kudos to all of the participants, some of who spent many hours trying to figure what it really was that was going wrong with a module, to make the whole ecosystem better.

Marketing Perl 6

Zoffix Znet has put a lot of time and effort into creating marketing materials for Perl 6. In a blog post titled: Introducing: Perl 6 Marketing Assets Web App, he immediately introduced the Perl 6 Marketing Assets Web App. This led to some comments on FaceBook and blogs.perl.org. Yours truly is looking forward to many more Perl 6 marketing materials. Do you have an idea to promote Perl 6? Please be sure to leave an issue in the Perl 6 Marketing Repo!

Rakudo Star 2018.06

Steve Mynott has just announced the Rakudo Star 2018.06 Release, which can now be downloaded. Because there was no 2018.07 Compiler Release of Rakudo, the Rakudo Star release is based on the 2018.06 Rakudo Compiler release.

Small stuff

Jo Christian Oterhals has written another fine blog post about Perl 6: Perl 6 small stuff #4: Why Perl isn’t COBOL nor Python nor Java (or… having fun with Rats). It made a lot of people comment: /r/perl, /r/perl6 and Twitter: #1 and #2. Yours truly can only say: keep up the good work, Jo Christian!

Newcomers Guide To Contributing

Zoffix Znet has written a blog post about the Newcomer Guide to Contributing to Core Perl 6, which introduces a draft version of that guide. Reactions could be found on FaceBook and Twitter!

Comma, a Perl 6 IDE

Jonathan Worthington has had an interview with the people of JetBrains about the Comma IDE, an integrated environment for development and debugging of Perl 6 programs. Comments were found at FaceBook and on Reddit.

Command Line Arguments

Luis has written a nice blog post about the Command line arguments in Perl 6. For some reason, it has been relatively unnoticed (so far). Hopefully, that will change now, as it is a nice introduction into the multitude of possibilities with command line argument handling in Perl 6!

Ping Pong

Brian has started a new blog, with its first article about message passing between threads in Perl 6. Zoffix Znet liked it.

A Long Sad Story

raiph successfully started a discussion about Regexp Ranges and Locales: A Long Sad Story, and how that is still Less Than Awesome in Perl 6.

Migrating Perl 5 code

Elizabeth Mattijsen started a series of 12 articles about the migration of Perl 5 code to Perl 6. This gave rise to comments on Reddit.

Core Developments

• Ticket status of last week and the month of July.
• Daniel Green fixed a large number of compiler warnings when compiling MoarVM with clang. He also optimized array slices if they consisted of only literal index values, and made Buf.subbuf about 8x as fast.
• Bart Wiegmans finally merged a refactor of a part of the JIT expression engine, on which he’d been working at least 6 months, making it easier for everybody to create JIT templates.
• Zoffix Znet cherry-picked and adapted some of his work on the cancelled rationals grant.
• Tom Browder implemented proper support in Perl 6 pod for =defn definition lists.
• Jonathan Worthington wrote an RFC about possible ways to implement more binary handling primitives in MoarVM and Perl 6. Please leave a comment if you feel you can add to the discussion.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen slightly changed the semantics of the set operators that do not return Bool. They will now return a mutable version of the result if the first operand of the set operator was also mutable.
• And many other smaller fixes, optimizations and improvements.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Reading simple files by Joelle Maslak.
• Perl 6’s version of React by berna.
• Changing the sort order by Joelle Maslak.
• Once you try Perl 6… by ryn1x.
• Perl 6 following in Perl 5’s footsteps by Erez.
• On a Raspberry Pi 3 by ryn1x.
• Starting Tomorrow by JJ Merelo.
• Switching to the cooler sibling by Zoffix Znet.
• Regex Fun by Simon Proctor.
• All on SlackBuilds! by ryn1x.
• New milestone by H.Merijn Brand.
• Marketing Business by Zoffix Znet.
• Grammar / rules auto-complete by Jonathan Worthington.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• Planning to buy “Learning Perl 6” by Zarul Zakuan.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Is it possible to compile/install Perl 6 on a Raspberry Pi 3? by ryn1x.
• Writing an attribute trait by Vadim Belman.
• The is copy trait drops the type of Array objects by Fernando Santagata.
• Assigning a value to the attribute of a mixed-in role by JJ Merelo.
• Returning values from exception handlers by Sean.
• How to give more memory to MoarVM? by lisprogtor.
• Can Perl 6 cmp two strings case insensitively? by p6steve.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• What does ^methods really tell you? by Joseph Brenner.
• Can’t match unicode chars? by Marc Chantreux.
• Parsing with Regexes and Grammars by Theo van den Heuvel.
• Parsing in different modes by Theo van den Heuvel.
• Start up delay? by ToddAndMargo.
• Need regex help by ToddAndMargo.
• Catching exceptions in expressions by Sean McAfee.
• OT: catch the bash error? by ToddAndMargo.
• Creating the August 2018 Perl 6 survey by Benji.

Perl 6 in comments

• Controversial nodes by Discipulus.
• You left out those who love Perl by 1nickt.
• More freely integrated in Perl 6 by SimonClinch.
• Burning through pumpkings by eritain.
• Perl 6 approach by raiph.
• A huge change? by monkey_fish.
• Multiple representations by Reini Urban.
• A bit like 123.do by Nigel Hamilton.
• The following means by b2gills.
• Want it to be true by b2gills.
• Scewer casing by totalperspectiv.
• Negative nellies, butterfly boosters and pedants by 1nickt.

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

• Algorithm::SetUnion by Itsuki Toyota.

Please note that updated modules exclude the modules that are updated, but which are not (yet) on CPAN. CPAN uploads are one place to check, updates to many hundreds of different repositories is something that will need to be automated:

• Terminal::Spinners by ryn1x.
• Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Cordova by Alexey Melezhik.
• CamelPub by Don Park.
• Algorithm::LBFGS by Itsuki Toyota.
• ScaleVec by Sam Gillespie.
• AWS::Session, Amazon::DynamoDB, DateTime::DST and Getopt::ForClass by Sterling Hanenkamp.
• IO::Path::Dirstack by Patrick Spek.
• Test::HTTP::Server by Simon Proctor.
• Image::QRCode by Fernando Santagata.
• RDF::Turtle by Brian Duggan.
• Sub::Memoized, P5localtime, P5tie, Time::localtime, Time::gmtime and P5readlink by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Winding Down

Wow again. Hot Stuff. And not only outside!

Next week’s Perl 6 Weekly might come a little later, possibly on Tuesday, because yours truly will have been busy giving the Making your Perl 5 Modules work in Rakudo Perl 6 workshop at The Perl Conference in Glasgow on Monday. Which, through an unfortunate planning situation, runs in parallel with Jeff Goff‘s ‎Introduction to Perl 6 workshop. Both of which still have seats available (hint, hint!).

See you sometime next week for more news from the exciting world of Perl 6!

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!

2018.30 Triplicate Guts

In the past weeks, Jonathan Worthington has done a lot of work refactoring MoarVM / NQP / Rakudo internals to set the stage for many future optimizations, made possible by the Perl Foundation. Last week he’s reported about them in not 1, not 2, but 3 blogs posts:

• Better usage information in the MoarVM specializer
• More precise deoptimization usage tracking
• Dynamic lookups and context introspection with inlining

Recommended reading if you want to know more about what is going on behind the scenes in Rakudo Perl 6.

German Perl Workshop Videos

The videos of the German Perl Workshop 2018 are now available for your perusal. These videos have Perl 6 related content in them:

• Building and Consuming HTTP Services in Perl 6 with Cro by Jonathan Worthington.
• Aus dem Leben eines Perl 6 Modulautors (German) by Herbert Breunung.
• Changing Image of Perl by Wendy Van Dijk.
• 8 ways to do concurrency and parallelism in Perl 6 by Jonathan Worthington.
• The Future of Perl is Here by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• How does deoptimization help us go faster and other by Jonathan Worthington.

Core Developments

• Ticket status of last week.
• Potential breaking change undone (see last weeks Core Developments): the is required trait does make sense on private attributes in a class, so it will no longer cause an exception when specified on a private attribute.
• Jonathan Worthington mostly spent his time on fixing bugs that were uncovered by the latest round of refactoring. He also re-instated two bugs (one about returning a Proxy object from a subroutine without the is rw trait, the other related to slangs): fixing these broke too many ecosystem modules.
• Timo Paulssen made it possible to have the system decide for an asynchronous socket on a host/port to listen to, and be able to find out which host/port they are actually on.
• Jonas Kramer made sure that file extensions and executability flags are set correctly on all of the internal scripts.
• Jeremy Studer added a lot of JIT-templates.
• Zoffix Znet continued his preparations for the 6.d release of Rakudo Perl 6. He also fixed a bug that would refer to a wrong scope when currying a WhateverCode.
• Joelle Maslak improved error reporting when using Perl 5 style positional captures (like \1 instead of $1) in a regular expression.
• Samantha McVey chased a strange hashing error that appears to only happen when MoarVM is compiled with an ancient libc.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made the is required($reason) trait on attributes work again. She also fixed an issue with calling .roll and .pick on Ranges with very large integer values.
• And many other fixes and improvements.

Meanwhile on Twitter

If you are tweeting about Perl 6, please include @perl6org in your tweet if you would like to have it retweeted by the Perl 6 News Feed.

• Observations today by Joelle Maslak.
• Spotted at OSCON by Zoffix Znet.
• Great language with a great message by ryn1x.
• Working Day by Simon Proctor.
• Showing off by The Perl Shop.
• A third shorter by Zoffix Znet.
• Spotted in the wild by Robert Blackwell.
• Out of intro books already by Joshua McAdams.
• Creating custom IO handles by Zoffix Znet.
• Perl 6 Documentation BOF by JJ Merelo.
• Super cute by kamiokan.
• Another happy user by Zoffix Znet.
• First contribution by Joelle Maslak.
• Can have circular module dependencies by Zoffix Znet.
• Double header Perl 6 talks in Toronto by Zoffix Znet.
• Learned some new tricks by Joelle Maslak.
• See Simon … by Simon Proctor.
• Have to do my part by Joelle Maslak.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• Perl Foundation has renewed their website (Perl 6) by Wendy van Dijk.
• Perl Foundation has renewed their website (Perl Programmers) by Wendy van Dijk.
• Coming in handy by Zoffix Znet.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Can’t run “cro stub” etc by zentrunix.
• Cro::WebSocket::Client doesn’t work by zentrunix.
• How to open a file handle on a string? by chenyf.
• Grammar, not sure about some syntax in an example by lisprogtor.
• Cro::WebSocket::Client doesn’t see when the server goes out by zentrunix.
• Cro user session gets forgotten by Erik Colson.
• When is “race” worthwhile? by JJ Merelo.
• Syntax of the method of an instantiated object: can’t seem to get it right by JJ Merelo.
• .pick not supported on a .Mix by JJ Merelo.
• Is there a builtin method similar to Counter in Python? by Stats4224.
• Why does Perl 6 try to evaluate an infinite list only in one of two similar situations? by Sean.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• MAIN subroutine by Laurent Rosenfeld.

Perl 6 in comments

• For my purpose, yes by jdoege.
• Give Perl 6 another try by nerdponx.
• What are some features new to Perl 6 that should be adopted by other languages? (/r/ProgrammingLanguages and /r/programming) by Patrick Spek.
• Far beyond regular expressions by cestith.
• Not exactly alive by shp0ngle.
• Perl 6 energy drain by cutler.
• Ever nudged NQP by raiph.
• Friendly towards fp by dragonwriter.
• More flexibility by totalperspectiv.
• Beautiful contenders by KirinDave.
• A different language by Ultimatt.
• A little too late by carlmr.
• A disaster by tripleblack.
• There’s an operator for it by Matt Oates.

Perl 6 modules

New Modules:

• Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Nuget::Build by Alexey Melezhik.
• Hash::Restricted by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• SeqSplitter by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.

Updated Modules:

• Image::Libexif, Desktop::Notify, Archive::Libarchive::Raw and Archive::Libarchive by Fernando Santagata.
• Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Build by Alexey Melezhik.
• Chart::Gnuplot by Itsuki Toyota.
• Algorithm::Evolutionary::Simple by JJ Merelo.

Winding Down

Most of the work of the past week, was making triply sure that the 2018.07 compiler release would not break anything in the ecosystem. This is hard work. Which makes one long for a vacation. Perhaps next week? See you then!

2018.29 Cross-pollination

With a pollen-rich environment this time of year in the Northern hemisphere, it is to be expected that some cross-pollination will take place. In an unexpected twist, the question “What are some features new to Perl 6 that should be adopted by other languages?” created some interesting answers on Quora and Reddit. Which then gave rise to the more expected question “What feature in another language would you like to see adopted in Perl 6?” with equally interesting answers.

New Marketing Poster

Zoffix Znet has created a thought provoking marketing poster in the Perl 6 Marketing repository (FaceBook comments). It references Paul Graham‘s concept of a hundred year programming language. A quote from this blog post of 2003:

There are some stunningly novel ideas in Perl, for example. Many are stunningly bad, but that’s always true of ambitious efforts. At its current rate of mutation, God knows what Perl might evolve into in a hundred years.

To which yours truly can only add with 20/20 hindsight: I think we’ve had most of the “stunningly bad ideas” in Perl 6 by now.

Cancellation

Zoffix Znet announced in his blog post titled “Cancellation of Perl 6 Constants and Rationals Grant that he will cease working on the “Bugfixing and Performance of Rationals Fixing Constraints on Constants grant.

In conclusion, I believe were this grant to be completed, the result would differ significantly from what was voted on during grant’s proposal. For that reason, I wish to cancel it.

Yours truly would like to thank Zoffix Znet for all the (now volunteer) work that he has put into this.

Core Developments

• Ticket status of last week.
• Potential breaking change: the is required trait does not make sense on private attributes in a class because private attributes will never be assigned by the default object building logic (aka .new). To avoid confusion, adding is required to a private attribute is now a compilation error.
• Jonathan Worthington did an enormous amount of work on providing the prerequisites for the next round of speeding up Rakudo Perl 6, and Timo Paulssen helped him with this. Unfortunately, this also meant some ecosystem breakage that is in process of getting fixed. Hopefully all of this will be summarized in a soon to be published blogpost.
• Samantha McVey continued her work on low-level hashes in MoarVM, now using a SipHash based algorithm. While doing this, she also managed to reduce the memory usage of each key in every hash by 8 bytes.
• Zoffix Znet fixed several issues regarding the initialization of decoders in IO::Handle, and the immutability of the result of Proc.command. He also did a lot of preparation work for the future 6.d language version.
• Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev focused on various issues with regards to the installation of Rakudo.
• Daniel Green fixed an issue with regards to decontainerization of !=.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed an issue with concatenation of two Junctions. She also improved the speed of .sum on native integer arrays (1.2x as fast normally, 35x as fast with the new :wrap named parameter) and improved the immutability of Map while making initalization of a Map between 1.5x and 4x as fast.
• And many other smaller fixes and improvements.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Moving goal posts by Zoffix Znet.
• About to enter the 10K realm by JJ Merelo.
• The Perl 6 dev community today by JJ Merelo.
• 10K commits! by JJ Merelo.
• New documentation for Cro::HTTP::Test by Tommy Stanton.
• Generate an IPv6 address by Joelle Maslak.
• Another happy Perl 6 user by Zoffix Znet.
• Ready! by JJ Merelo.
• They have nouns and verbs and … by Joelle Maslak.
• Starting EvoSoft by JJ Merelo.
• A bit more turbulent by Zoffix Znet.
• My favorite operator by Joelle Maslak.
• Neat, %% by Jeff Goff.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• Questions and Answers on StackOverflow by Wendy van Dijk.
• Mobile Perl 6 Work Place by Fritz Zaucker.
• Paper on Evolutionary Algorithms by Wendy van Dijk.
• More interesting stuff by Wendy van Dijk.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Double junction arguments swapping sides by Kegan.
• Module name matching by Patrick Spek.
• Array stays array when looped through for by Patrick Spek.
• Multiple Possible Output Types by Simon Proctor.
• How to insert a space between Chinese character and English character? by chenyf.
• No such method name for invocant of type class by madcrazydrumma.
• Is there a Perl 6 equivalent of a byte array? by madcrazydrumma.
• Why does Perl 6 multi default to sub? by p6steve.
• ^= operator doesn’t produce a result, causing program to never terminate by madcrazydrumma.
• Equivalents to Java’s >> and >>> operators? by madcrazydrumma.
• How to implement recursive grammar? by Vadim Belman.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• An interesting math formula to share by ToddAndMargo.

Perl 6 in comments

• A JIT since 2014 by b2gills.
• Not very good at optimizing Perl 6 by b2gills.
• Also a Perl 6 in LearnXinYminutes by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Impressed by 3rdAccount.
• What’s Perl 6? by yoyoq12.
• 10x slower, solid F… a winner by cluelessbilly.
• Taking the bait by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Perl 6 VM Parrot? by aidenn0.
• Is Perl 6 fast now? by sunseb.
• Adding PDL-type features easily by b2gills.
• Opposite end of spectrum by sheepmullet.
• Dangerous situation by Reini Urban.
• What Perl 6 has become by cuckcuckspruce.
• My fave language by Ultimatt.
• Using duck-typing instead by minimim.
• Infantile Butterfly by Jenda.
• Perl 6 solutions by raiph.
• Keep Perl in the name by syphilis.
• Any good press? by Jenda.
• Object systems rolled into one by raiph.
• A great artist by Anonymous Monk.
• Sillycon by shmem.

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

• App::Lang::French::VerbTrainer by Zoffix Znet.
• Version::Semantic by Patrick::Spek.
• Image::Libexif by Fernando Santagata.
• Tuple by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Modules:

• Readline by Jeff Goff.
• Dist::Helper by Patrick Spek.
• DOM::Tiny and AWS::Session by Sterling Hanenkamp.
• Sys::Hostname and P5substr by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Build by Alexey Melezhik.
• P6Repl::Helper by Jack Kuan.
• PDF::Class by David Warring.

Winding Down

On the hottest day of the year (so far), it was quite a job again to get the Perl 6 Weekly together. So much happening! Yours truly hopes to be able to keep this up until next week. See you then!

2018.28 Введение в Perl 6

Alexander Kiryuhin has made it possible for yet another 170 million people in the world to get introduced to Perl 6 in their native language: Russian (Большое спасибо!). This now brings the number of translation of the original Introduction to Perl 6 to 12: Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. Which means that now over 3 billion people can learn about Perl 6 in their native language.

Credit where credit is due

Zoffix Znet describes how bugs in a script caused some contributors not to be mentioned in the monthly Rakudo compiler releases. His blog post “The Missing Contributors of Perl 6 describes in detail how the bugs got introduced, how it affected the report generation, and how a Reddit post from a person claiming to be the only person to never receive any credit for their work on Perl 6, got him to look into this. In the end, the following people (who are not already in the CREDITS of Rakudo Perl 6), were not credited when they should have been:

A. Sinan Unur, Alexey Melezhik, Antonio, Antonio Quinonez, Benny Siegert, bitrauser, brian d foy, Brian Duggan, cc, Christopher Bottoms, Coleoid, coypoop, Dabrien ‘Dabe’ Murphy, Dale Evans, Dan Zwell, Daniel Dehennin, Daniel Perrett, Dave Olszewski, David Brunton, David H. Adler, Dominique Dumont, Douglas L. Schrag, elenamerelo, Emeric54, Eric de Hont, fireartist, Fritz Zaucker, gotoexit, Jake Russo, James ( Jeremy ) Carman, Jason Cole, Jeff Linahan, Jim Davis, JJ Merelo, jjatria, Joel, John Gabriele, Julien Simonet, LemonBoy, Marcel Timmerman, Mario, Mark Montague, Martin Barth, Martin Dørum Nygaard, Martin Ryan, Mathieu Gagnon, mryan, Nadim Khemir, Nat, Neil Shadrach, Nic Q, okaoka, parabolize, Patrick Sebastian Zimmermann, Paul Smith, Philippe Bruhat (BooK), Rafael Schipiura, raiph, Robert Lemmen, Robert Newbould, Salvador Ortiz, Siavash Askari Nasr, Simon Ruderich, Skarsnik, Sylvain Colinet, sylvarant, vinc17fr, VZ, wukgdu.

Again, kudos to all these people and the work they have done for Perl 6. Apologies for not having done this at the proper time. Also, always remember Hanlon’s razor!

Documentation Squashathon results

As JJ Merelo tweeted, it was Squashathon time again last weekend. You could use this very useful flowchart to find out where the best place would be for you to start. A flowchart that will generally be useful for some time to come! And the results are in: 18 people created 154 commits and 7 pull requests! The next Squashathon will be on 4 August.

JITting quite a while already

Nudged by a comment on Hacker News, Bart Wiegmans explains that MoarVM has had a JIT for quite some time already. That maybe the naming of spesh and jit in MoarVM (as opposed to JIT frontend / backend) may be the root cause for this lack of understanding.

Perl 6 Workshops at TPC in Glasgow

There will not be one, but two whole day Perl 6 workshops on Monday 13 August at the Perl Conference in Glasgow:

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

Each priced at a mere £125 (about 142 euro / 167 US$), you can buy your tickets here.

Five Years of SPW

Lee Johnson is looking back on five years of the Swiss Perl Workshop, which had quite a lot of Perl 6 related activities, such as a hackathon to work out the “Great List Refactor” needed for the Christmas 2015 release of Rakudo Perl 6! This year’s Swiss Perl Workshop will be in Bern on 7 / 8 September. You can still submit a talk. And of course, you can still register for this free workshop!

Understanding Perl 6 concurrency

A question on /r/perl6 created an interesting set of links if you want to better understand concurrency in Perl 6!

New sticker

Yours truly introduced a new sticker at the Dutch Perl Workshop last weekend. These will be available for free at all events that yours truly is able to visit in the foreseeable future. Interested in getting a few beforehand? Contact me on #perl6 on irc.freenode.net! Or download the image and make them yourself, or order a local sticker maker to make ones for you!

Core developments

• Ticket status of last week.
• Jeremy Studer and Ben Davies continued working on improving MoarVM JIT expression templates.
• Jonathan Worthington continued his work on refactoring handling of Scalar containers, specifically focused on fact collection for spesh, inlining and de-optimizations. This work has now been merged.
• Samantha McVey fixed a number of compiler warnings in different compilers and continued her work on making the implementation of hashes on MoarVM faster and more tamper-resistant. She also made the low-level native int to str conversion 2x as fast by not relying on sprintf.
• Jonas Kramer made sure that the error that is thrown when a module can not be found for loading, shows the line in which the use statement occurs.
• And some smaller fixes and tweaks.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Cute new Comma feature by Jonathan Worthington.
• Next Comma Release by Jonathan Worthington.
• CommaIDE named after a Butterfly by Zoffix Znet.
• Missed a colon by Zoffix Znet.
• Set minus awesometastic by Zoffix Znet.
• Waiting for D by Zoffix Znet.
• Perl 6 quizlet anyone? by Zoffix Znet.
• Cooking for an army? by Melinda Kiss.
• Polym-old by Zoffix Znet.
• Perl hard by Melinda Kiss.
• 32bit Rakudo builds by Timo Paulssen.
• Lizmat keynoting by JJ Merelo.
• Automatically handles command line arguments by Joelle Maslak.
• Dromecentric -> Cpannical view by JJ Merelo.
• Based on llvm? by Silicon Valley Perl.
• Stuff I learned by JJ Merelo.
• Please help test for upcoming Rakudo Star release by Zoffix Znet.
• On GraalVM/Truffle by The Perl Shop.
• 12 commits away from 10K by JJ Merelo.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• What editor? by Ali Elshishini.
• 3 Billion people can now learn Perl 6 by Wendy van Dijk.
• Finishing by Fritz Zaucker.
• Readline temporary fix by Jeff Goff.
• Binaries for Linux? by Ali Elshishini.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Declaring “native” types by JJ Merelo.
• Where are Rakudo x86 32-bit precompiled installer/binaries? by gapsf.
• Where should “Cro Endpoint HTTP” be defined? by Mimosinnet.
• Regex match conjunction && by lisprogtor.
• callwith not calling other candidates? by JJ Merelo.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Bailador vs. Cro by mimosinnet.

Perl 6 in comments

• GraalVM/Truffle backend update by minimim.
• Python is the new Perl by sedachv.
• Disasters such as Perl 6 by olooney.
• Breaking syntax by gkya.
• Best place to learn Perl? by nandojoe.

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

• Hash-with by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• P6Repl::Helper by Jack Kuan.
• unprint by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• String::Fold and Test::Performance by Patrick Spek.

Updated Modules:

• Object::Trampoline by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• IO::Glob by Sterling Hanenkamp.
• Timer::Breakable by Simon Proctor.
• PDF::Class by David Warring.

Winding Down

Quite a busy, but very “gezellige” week. Meeting old friends at the Dutch Perl Workshop, is one of the best things you can do on a hot weekend. The Perl Community at its best! Looking forward to all of the other Perl events in the future. Until then, see you next week for another Perl 6 Weekly!