2018.42 A better Atom for 6

Ahmad M. Zawawi has completed the first version of Perl 6 language support for the Atom IDE, based on an App::Perl6LangServer module that can be used by any editor / IDE that supports the Microsoft AppServer architecture. If you’re a fan of the Atom editor / Atom IDE, this will make it a lot easier to work with Perl 6 in it. So now Perl 6 doesn’t have one IDE, but two (the other one being the Comma IDE of course).

Perl[56] on the 35c3

Daniel Böhmer is trying to get a Perl Assembly together for the 35th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig, Germany. So if you would like to hang out together with other Perl people at the CCC, contact Daniel to make this happen! (FaceBook comments).

6.d review completed

Zoffix Znet has completed his pre-release review of 6.d spec (Twitter comments 1, 2). A truly impressive piece of work at almost 3500 commits reviewed and more than 400 corrections and improvements. Kudos!

JIT Grant Proposal

Bart Wiegmans has submitted a Perl Foundation grant request titled: MoarVM JIT Compiler Expression Backend Maturation. Focus of this grant will be on JITting floating point operations, improving generated code quality and improved handling of “irregular” instructions such as div. Comments as always welcome! (Reddit and grant comments).

Stupid Numeric Ticks

scruss got a little bit carried away trying to do as much as possible with Unicode numbers in a blog post titled: 𒐳 / ༳ == ( ⑽ – 𐹭 ) * ( 𒐲 / 𐅉 ), of course. Why does one do this? Well, because one can! In any case, a nice example of the flexibility of Perl 6 (Hacker News, Reddit comments).

Markatu – a lightweight markup language

Brian Duggan dove into the world of markup languages by creating a markup language called Markatu, inspired by markdown’s brevity and slim’s flexibility. In the article he describes the (Perl 6) techniques he used to create this markup language, and also lists the source that he created to render the HTML of the article (Twitter, Reddit comments).

OSCON 2018

Jim Brandt reports on the Perl booth at OSCON in Portland, OR this year. Caution: contains explicit pictures of swag.

No Perl DevRoom at FOSDEM 2019

The organizers of the Perl DevRoom at FOSDEM have been told that there will not be a Perl DevRoom at the coming FOSDEM. This is a big disappointment, but in the view of the number of groups wanting to have a DevRoom (about 140) and the number of rooms available (about 30), Perl has had a good run in the past years (FaceBook comments).

Core Developments

• Ticket status of past week.
• Bart Wiegmans fixed several small JIT issues.
• Tzu-Li Chen performed a lot of code cleanup in NQP for the Java backend.
• Paweł Murias continued his work on integrating the three backends of Rakudo Perl 6 even better, specifically in the area of native integers and makefiles. He also fixed the REPL on the Javascript backend and removed the undocumented and not correctly functioning --encoding command line parameter.
• Valentin Anger fixed several problems introduced during the scalar refactor.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen refactored the handling of MAIN subroutines, allowing for better pluggability. She also documented these new features in a separate Command Line Interface documentation page, and added tests for all these new (and old) features.
• Tom Browder added a lot of notes and hints on the use of NQP.
• And some smaller fixes and improvements.

Questions about Perl 6

• Find out whether a container is a class or an object by JJ Merelo.
• Testing with use-ok on modules with a MAIN definition by Patrick Spek.
• How to correctly augment Any? by Matthias Krull.
• How can you call JavaScript builtins with the new JS backend? by A. Albano.
• Recursively flatten a multidimensional array by Fernando Santagata.
• Error if path to includes non latin characters by Shniperson.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Biblical Corpus Analysis by Not Jack.
• Weighing in by Joelle Maslak.
• Everytime a DSL by bytesize eater.
• Cheaper of Book Depository by brian d foy.
• New intro page doc by JJ Merelo.
• Kissing goodbye by Marc Chantreux.
• Can’t write it in Perl 6 (rip ;-;) by bytesize eater.
• Post Reviews by brian d foy.
• Earned its place by Chris.
• Deflating Instant columns by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Perl 6 Workshop? by Simon Proctor.
• Hyphens in variable names by りひに.
• Troisième backend by Mongueurs de Perl.
• Perl 6 kinda qualifies by Charlie Barto.
• My eventual tool by Justin.
• Ruby can only wish by Chris.
• Custom inflators / deflators by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Might be a Perl 6 now by Tim VanFosson.
• raylib bindings by Timo Paulssen.
• What it’s like to be a bat by Justin.
• Perl 6 obviously by Joshua Eric Turcotte.
• Some pointers on command line scripting by Simon Proctor.
• Comma looks very promising! by ryn1x.
• Testing applications using RED by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Spooky by Danny McClanahan.
• In the Toronto Public Library by brian d foy.
• Extra parentheses by Joelle Maslak.
• Routinely returning by Zoffix Znet.
• Perhaps grammars are better by Joaquín Ferrero.
• Local library Think Perl 6 by Zoffix Znet.
• Circular data structures without leaks by Joelle Maslak.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• git beer by Fritz Zaucker.
• August 2012 by Wendy van Dijk.
• Favourite language by Daniel Mita.
• Equation? by Jeff Goff.
• To all those promoting Perl 6 by Douglas Schrag.
• warp packer? by Mark Swayne.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• loop on a Buf / binary by ToddAndMargo.
• eof? by ToddAndMargo.
• slurp so many? by ToddAndMargo.
• Use of the –output flag by Simon Proctor.
• How do I Stringy a Buf? by ToddAndMargo.
• Atom file icons of executables by Richard Hainsworth.
• Strange output on say Foo::Bar::<&zape> by Richard Hogaboom.
• Run tests only if a module is available by Fernando Santagata.
• need –> help by ToddAndMargo.
• Malformed UTF-8??? by ToddAndMargo.
• What is |c? by ToddAndMargo.
• enc? by ToddAndMargo.
• Need :enc help? by ToddAndMargo.

Perl 6 in comments

• Aware of Perl 6 by Ralph Mellor.
• Future of Perl? by melling.
• Scoped continuations? by Ralph Mellor.
• Fantastic Talk Plus by Fede_V.
• Towards language support for distributed systems by Ralph Mellor.
• Tried porting yet? by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Not using ICU by Ralph Mellor.
• Perl 6 Rules by Ralph Mellor.
• Version that works on Chrome by Ralph Mellor.
• Time to look at Perl 6? by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Perl 6 Rules Explained by Ralph Mellor.
• Used to use APR by Ralph Mellor.
• Describe accessors in a class definition by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Perls? by Ralph Mellor.
• Not just the developers of Perl 6 by Ralph Mellor.
• One bit of anecdata by Ralph Mellor.

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

• Math::FFT::Libfftw3 by Fernando Santagata.
• App::Perl6LangServer by Ahmad M. Zawawi.

Updated Modules:

• File::Zip by Patrick Spek.
• Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Build, Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Cordova, Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Angular::Build by Alexey Melezhik.
• Algorithm::AhoCorasick by Titsuki Toyota.
• App::Mi6 by Shoichi Kaji.
• App::Tasks by Joelle Maslak.
• POFile by Jonathan Worthington.

Winding Down

A busy week again, with some sad news with regards to FOSDEM. But please don’t cancel your travel plans to Brussels because of that: one could also see this as an opportunity to spread knowledge about Perl to other tracks. So if you see an opportunity of submitting a presentation about Perl (be it Perl 5 or Perl 6), please do take that opportunity to get out of the echo chamber! And on that note yours truly wishes everybody a good week. Until next week, for more Perl 6 news!

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2018.41 Merged the JS!

Rakudo Perl 6 now has 3 supported backends: MoarVM, JVM and Javascript! Paweł Murias has merged his work of the past years into the master branch of Rakudo Perl 6 (reactions on Twitter: 1, 2). This is definitely a milestone! But there’s still a lot of work to be done to really make it more performant and have all of the features of the leading backend MoarVM. But a definite beachhead into the world of Javascript has now been established. And a doubling of the bus number of people who have implemented a backend for NQP / Rakudo Perl 6!

Speeding up object creation

Jonathan Worthington explains how the recent Perl 6 object creation speed improvements actually came about. In short, a combination of bug fixes in multi-dispatch cache, implementing some things that were planned but simply not implemented yet, a closer look at how the BUILDALL method is generated, and a lot of speshialization fixes.

A future for fork

Bart Wiegmans describes his work on making it possible to use fork() (again) in Perl 6 on the MoarVM backend on systems that support POSIX semantics. An impressive effort to make a heavily threaded system dance to the prerequisites that fork needs!

Math::Matrix (part 4)

Herbert Breunung continued his series about Math::Matrix in part 4 focusing on naming methods. An interesting read:

But even mathematics has its history and culture and for instance an adjugate matrix can also be called classical adjoint or sometimes adjunct. In that case I went with adjugate because it’s a recently used term, it’s short and I sensed the least potential for ambiguity with other existing methods.

Another benchmark

Robert Lemmen has another benchmark running based on monthly Rakudo compiler releases. Yours truly is looking forward to the results of the 2018.10 compiler release due in a few weeks. Meanwhile, there appears to be one benchmark he’s soliciting assistance on. Any takers?

My first Perl 6 program

bobthecimmerian describes how he created his first Perl 6 program in only a few days from having no experience with Perl 6 at all.

Having it both ways

Michael Stevenson has published an interesting article about the history of Perl titled “Having it both ways: Larry Wall, Perl and the technology and culture of the early web. This brings back memories for yours truly, but is also an interesting read for anybody who would like to know more about those early times of the Web (Twitter, Reddit comments).

A Perl 6 introduction for the curious

With a very understated tweet, Victor Borisov announced the availability of a Russian 80-page introduction to Perl 6 “for the curious”. Yours truly just loves it when Perl 6 related things appear on the web “out of nowhere”. It proves that Perl 6 is getting out of the echo chamber!

Squashathon Results

Last weekend saw another Squasathon in the Hacktoberfest month. The winner is JJ Merelo: he will receive a plush Camelia as the price for the most Pull Requests.

A Language Name Alias

Zoffix Znet posted a blog titled “A Request to Larry Wall to Create a Language Name Alias for Perl 6” in which he compiled his argumentation for the need of a marketing alias for Perl 6 (/r/perl, /r/perl6, /r/programmingcirclejerk, blogs.perl.org, and Twitter comments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This excludes two extensive discussions on FaceBook that have unfortunately been removed by the original posters).

Core Developments

• Ticket status of past week.
• Bart Wiegmans fixed a problem in the JIT with regards to PHI nodes with labels.
• Jonathan Worthington fixed a problem in call optimization and a leak in spesh.
• Jeremy Studer reverted a problematic optimization for bit shift operations.
• Timo Paulsen made NativeCall‘s CArray[42] return a container so you can assign to it.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed an issue with type constrained hashes that wouldn’t correctly type check.
• And many other smaller fixes and improvements.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Of course by JJ Merelo.
• On WSL by Joelle Maslak.
• Nice answer by brian d foy.
• That time of the month by JJ Merelo.
• Wanna win? by Zoffix Znet.
• Jealous of hardcover by brian d foy.
• Who told them? by Danny McClanahan.
• Command line editing broken by Broken Code Bot.
• October 2014 by Patrick Spek.
• Not true for Perl 6 yet by Joelle Maslak.
• Fun project by Timo Paulsen.
• Counting columns by Winfred Raj.
• Pod6 tutorial by Bart Ortiz.
• Submitted for LPW / FOSDEM by JJ Merelo.
• Perl 6 Rocks by Dr. B.Beaufils.
• What remains to be faster still by Jonathan Worthington.
• No Problem by JJ Merelo.
• Squashathon Over by JJ Merelo.
• Modules done right by Danny McClanahan.
• Encouraging news by brian d foy.
• Baroque knowledge by Stewart Russell.
• ?? !! tighter than assignment by こたつがめ.

‏

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• 19% faster by Joelle Maslak.
• Best practices publishing Perl 6 modules by Helmut Wollmersdorfer.
• Your first programming language by Andrew Shitov.
• Perl 6 in production by Fritz Zaucker.
• A test-t recap by Wendy van Dijk.
• Looking back to 2006 by Andrew Shitov.

Questions about Perl 6

Although StackOverflow is probably the best place to ask specific questions about Perl 6, sometimes people ask them at other places such as Reddit as well. Yours truly will now put these together into a Questions about Perl 6 section from now on.

• Catching exception of a shell command by Eugene Barsky.
• Why are the source file names not human readable? by Matthias Krull.
• Binding of private attributes: nqp::bindattr vs := by Vadim Belman.
• Why does command after if False produce an empty list in REPL? by Eugene Barsky.
• Multiple components in an array slice – equivalent to perl5: @a[0..1,3] by Richard J. Acton.
• Can you write Perl 6 scripts using an encoding that is not utf8? by JJ Merelo.
• Translating single quote using trans by JJ Merelo.
• Compiles to different targets by jsor.
• Generics, and associated type declarations by bobthecimmerian.
• Exporting regexes from grammars by JJ Merelo.
• Private attribute in class makes typed public attributes undefined by Ben Davies.
• Printing objects by Eugene Barsky.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Although there have been a lot of Perl 6 questions of late on the perl6-users mailinglist, the format doesn’t lend itself to browsing for answers very well. So yours truly is keeping these separate, hoping for either a better place to view mail threads, or people moving to StackOverflow to ask their questions:

• What are the official names? by ToddAndMargo.
• Need doc help with [] by ToddAndMargo.
• A regex that tickles me by ToddAndMargo.
• Bitwise paper? by ToddAndMargo.
• Landing page for Documentation by Richard Hainsworth.
• Routine declaration line question by ToddAndMargo.
• Bitwise or? by ToddAndMargo.
• Thank you by Todd Chester.
• Flatten? by ToddAndMargo.
• What is the syntax of a reference pointer in Perl 6? by ToddAndMargo.
• ctrl-j? by ToddAndMargo.
• Websearches on “perl6” by Joseph Brenner.
• slurp so many? by ToddAndMargo.
• How do I address bytes in a Buf /binary variable? by ToddAndMargo.

Perl 6 in comments

• BOM with new insights by Merijn H. Brand.
• Refreshing to hear interest in Perl by Ralph Mellor.
• Game library? by Alihusejn.
• Perl 6? by wean_irdeh.
• Increasing speed by Daniel.
• Why I love using Perl 6 by mclehman.
• Bag eqv Bag by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Sigils make it easier by Ralph Mellor.

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

• WriteOnceHash, Map::Agnostic, Map::Ordered by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• DB::Migration::Simple by Matthias Bloch.
• SDL2 by Ahmad M. Zawawi.
• Oddmuse by Alex Schroeder.
• File::XML::DMARC::Google, File::Zip by Patrick Spek.

Updated Modules:

• JSON::Schema by Jonathan Worthington.
• Terminal::Spinners by ryn1x.
• App::Mi6, App::Platform by Shoichi Kaji.
• Getopt::Advance by araraloren.
• P5getpriority, Hash::Agnostic by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Cordova, Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Build::Assembly::Patch by Alexey Melezhik.
• PDF::Class by David Warring.
• SDL2::Raw by Timo Paulsen.
• App::Tasks by Joelle Maslak.

Winding Down

Again, a busy week with a lot happening. Please check in again next week for more Perl 6 news!

2018.40 Lesser Than Two

Jonathan Worthington has done it again! Only last week did Merijn H. Brand‘s speed canary script drop below 2 seconds for the first time. In the past week, it dropped below 1.7 seconds twice already (at moment of writing). Which indicates a speed increase of almost 20%. Wendy van Dijk wrote a blog post titled “Perl 6 speed improvements over the years” to make sure everybody is on the same page with regards to this benchmark, with some nice comments!

Fortunately, this speed increase was corroborated by H. Merijn Brand with another benchmark. A simple object creation script that showed that, at least for that benchmark, Perl 6 is now faster than any version of Perl 5.

To describe how these speed increases came about, Jonathan Worthington wrote two blogposts:

• Faster box/unbox and Int operations
• Eliminating unrequired guards

Recommended reading if you want to get to the nitty gritty! Or, if you want a bit more of an overview, check out the August 2018 Grant Report. Or if you want to get in even deeper: an overview of changes in Moar.

Another 6.d Teaser

Zoffix Znet released another Perl 6 Diwali Teaser (/r/perl, /r/perl6 comments). It describes how atomic operations allow multiple threads to update variables at the same time without needing any locking. If you have another idea to promote Perl 6, please be sure to leave an issue in the Perl 6 Marketing Repo!

RED developments

Fernando Correa de Oliveira invited people to look at his new ORM called RED which resulted in quite some nice feedback on Reddit.

Rakudo.js Update

Paweł Murias reports on the progress of running Perl 6 in the browser using Parcel. And why he prefers it over Webpack.

File encoding support

Samantha McVey reports on her progress in implementing several additional streaming encoders / decoders for encodings such as Shift-JIS and UTF16 and how to deal with BOM‘s in the latter encoding.

A naive introduction to OOP

This one appears to have been slipping through the cracks for more than a month: uzl has written a very nice naive introduction to object orientation. It takes a real-life use case, and creates an app from that.

Naming of variables

In the fifth instalment of the series titled How naming of variables works in Perl 6, yours truly shows that although on the surface variables look very much the same in Perl 6 compared to Perl 5, but that appearances can be deceiving. Oddly enough, this did not incite any comments on Reddit. It did generate a lot of (positive) tweets from all over the world.

Perl  Small Stuff #11

Jo Christian Oterhals looked at whether Perl 6 can pass the Numberphile calculator tests. And comes to some interesting conclusions!

Fixing the syntax barrier

In an almost year old blog post, Christopher Chedeau describes his frustrations with syntax errors caused by false friends when moving between programming languages. Zoffix Znet and Ralph Mellor had some thoughts in relation to Perl 6, specifically with regards to use isms.

House cleaning

Stefan Seifert describes how he has deployed a little Perl 6 daemon in production by using the operating system’s IO notifcation features that are exposed in Perl 6 as an asynchronous Supply of file change events. A nice example of how Perl 6 can gradually be used in an environment otherwise dominated by Perl 5.

Squashathon Ahead

On the 6th of October (anywhere in the world) it will be Squashathon Day again! This month, since it is October, your Pull Requests will also count towards the Hacktober Fest, thanks to the procedure put in place by Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev. Looking forward to see many of you active next Saturday!

Core Developments

• Ticket status of last week and the month of September.
• Timo Paulsen made it possible to have the JIT add comments to the spesh log.
• Bart Wiegmans continued his work on making fork work properly in Rakudo Perl 6 on operating systems that have a native fork() functionality. He also removed support for the JIT-log: this is now incorporated in the spesh-log and implemented support for a perf map on Linux.
• Zoffix Znet fixed a small-int / big-int boundary division that occurred when multiplying / dividing two integer values.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen optimized various forms of for iterating over ranges and sequences, making something like for 1,3...999999 about 150x faster. She also made [1,2,3], about 1.4x as fast.
• Samantha McVey updated Moar and Rakudo to use the Unicode 11.0.0 semantics and grapheme databases.
• And many other smaller fixes and improvements.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Copy in the office by Simon Proctor.
• Perl Quick Reference? by Moritz Lenz.
• Showing relationships in RED by Fernando Santagata.
• Qu’on m’a réclamé by doomyflo.
• Copies for everyone! by ryn1x.
• Perl 6 in the browser? by The Perl Shop.
• Structures we don’t use enough by JJ Merelo.
• Why I never learned Perl by twinkus botanicus.
• Great stuff! by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• This was going to happen by Curtis Poe.
• What Perl 6 did for atomic by JF Bastien.
• Even Perl 6! by bytesize eater.
• A natural upgrade? by Nicolas Mendoza.
• Great post about Perl 6 Internals by Stéphane Payrard.
• Hashes to represent data structures by Joelle Maslak.
• Directly from Brian by Christophe Monat.
• Don’t we ♥ Perl 6 by justgitthings.
• Up and running in less than a day by vijayvithal.
• Moose 40x slower by E. Choroba.
• Swag Photo by ryn1x.
• It’s a sign by Zoffix Znet.
• March 32nd by Moritz Lenz.
• Too powerful by うら.
• Evolutionary algorithms and Perl 6 by JJ Merelo.
• All glory! by Wean Irdeh.
• Testing and polishing the next Comma IDE update by Jonathan Worthington.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• How to make a Range with .., but counting down by Patrick Spek.
• How to get all the signatures of multi sub or build-ins? by chenyf.
• Reducing logical operators by Eugene Barsky.
• How to do something functionally with all the elements of a list? by Eugene Barsky.
• How to assign the .lines Seq to a variable and iterate over it? by Matthias Krull.
• How to reload modules used in the REPL? by Matthias Krull.
• Filtering elements matching two regexes by Eugene Barsky.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• Power of the Atom by Zoffix Znet.
• New Record! by Wendy van Dijk.
• Over the years by Wendy van Dijk.
• Faster than Perl 5 by Zoffix Znet.
• Lotsa Camelia’s by Wendy van Dijk.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Installing Perl 6 on shared server by Richard Hainsworth.
• words[] question by Todd Chester.
• Could this be any more obscure? by Todd Chester.
• Just posted a documentation RFE by ToddAndMargo.
• RFE‘s on Inf and words documentation by ToddAndMargo.
• A problem with native CArrays by Fernando Santagata.
• join questions by ToddAndMargo.
• Package Compile Question by Richard Hogaboom.

Perl 6 in comments

• Cross Pollination by Ralph Mellor.
• Named arguments similar to Perl 6 by 0rac1e.
• CLOS is a nice preview by yellowapple.
• Taken real characters on by Ralph Mellor.
• Compare with Perl 6 by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• A mammoth project by PegasusAndAcorn.
• Register based by tyingq.
• Don’t use the word “Char” by theindigamer.
• Running in a browser by marto.
• Unique things by Ralph Mellor.
• Containers that point to containers by fresheneez.
• Recursive descent parser generators by Ralph Mellor.
• Years behind by Ralph Mellor.
• Promise is the problem by smurfix.
• A Toy example by Ralph Mellor.

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

• Event::Emitter::Inter-Process by Tony O’Dell.
• ECMA262Regex by Edument AB.
• AccountableBagHash by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Modules:

• DBIish, Cache::Memcached by Jonathan Stowe.
• Getopt::Advance by araraloren.
• TAP::Harness by Leon Timmermans.
• Cache::Async by Robert Lemmen.
• App::Tasks by Joelle Maslak.

Winding down

When I said last week:

…a backlog of optimizations will see the spotlight in the week to come. Hopefully giving some really good news next week…

I couldn’t hope for the improvements we’ve actually seen! As Jonathan describes in his blog posts, there is more to come. But probably not in time for the 2018.10 Rakudo compiler / Rakudo Star release. So let’s enjoy the ride and see you next week for more Perl 6 news!

2018.39 Less Than Two

The speed canary script run daily by Merijn H. Brand has dropped below 2 seconds wallclock time for the first time in the history of the test being run (FaceBook comments). Since then, this has happened one more time (at moment of writing): there’s always a bit of noise involved with these timings. Check out the raw version of the speed log, if you want to keep up to date.

Rakudo 2018.09 Compiler Release

Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev and Samantha McVey have done it again: release MoarVM and the Rakudo Compiler. Claudio Ramirez took this as an immediate cue to update the directly installable Linux distributions. Kudos to all involved!

Thoughts on using Perl 6

Alex Schroeder explains in his blog post how he has been maintaining the Oddmuse wiki software since 2003, and that he is now learning Perl 6 using a real project (Reddit comments).

Math::Matrix

Herbert Breunung continued his series of blog posts about Math::Matrix:

• Part 2: Converter
• Part 3: When to use MMD

Documentation from the CLI

bdmatatu describes the quick hack with which it is possible to look at the documentation of docs.perl6.org from the command line.

Worth learning

EarlTheGray enquired about Perl 6 on Reddit, specifically about the functional programming side of it. And that there didn’t appear to be much of an active Perl 6 community. Yours truly guesses we need to get out more 🙂

Core Developments

• Ticket status of last week.
• Samantha McVey implemented the UTF16le and UTF16be streaming encoding / decoding while following the behaviour of Perl 5 with regards to BOMs.
• Tobias Boege fixed an issue with the recursion check of non-dwimmy hyperops.
• Zoffix Znet continued his tireless work in preparation for the 6.d release, specifically focussing on consistent behaviour of Rats.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed an issue with QuantHash.ACCCEPTS with regards to other QuantHashes of the same type.
• And many other smaller fixes and improvements.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Crochet by doomyflo.
• A Dream full of Dreams by モメン.
• Calvinball by Emily St.
• I want to see Perl 6 by きよっち@ドラゴンズとゴールデンキングス.
• I’m not joking by David Beazley.
• A Language I have never used by だっく.
• Left a long time ago by Krakpotkin.
• Specifically, Perl ! by ryn1x.
• A good programming book by cody.
• Like ccdiff by Joelle Maslak.
• A big deal by JJ Merelo.
• Algorithm trumps Language by Joelle Maslak.
• Obama by Guacamoley.
• Small wikis by Patrick Spek.
• Perl& 6 Maintainers too! by Suman Khanal, MS.
• Migrating to Perl 6 by Open Source Way.
• My task management program by Joelle Maslak.
• BGP Module Status by Joelle Maslak.
• Learning Perl 6 Shipping by brian d foy.
• Learning Perl 6 Impressions by Stéphane Payrard.
• New Functions by Herbert Breunung.
• New Docker container by JJ Merelo.
• Aleks-Daniel was in charge by JJ Merelo.
• Performance Analysis Tool by The Perl Shop.
• Maybe not spot on by Phil Wilmarth.
• Contender for language of the future by siliconbaytech.
• Simulation Model NH³ Production at Swiss Farms by Joaquín Ferrero.
• Red ORM API comments please! by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Stingray? by Stéphane Payrard.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Adding Authorization or Headers with Cro::WebSocket::Client? by Curt Tilmes.
• Is it possible for Perl 6 to work online? by Eugene Barsky.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• Perl 6 Wine! by Wendy van Dijk.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Extending built-in classes by Joseph Brenner.
• Grammar doesn’t seem to match any token by Mark Carter.

Perl 6 in comments

• Autovivification by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Build impossible programs by Bart Wiegmans.
• Will a Perl 6 program run on Perl 5? by _sh.
• Perl Wine by Wendy van Dijk.
• A language reboot Perl 6 style by pjmlp.
• Superset of capabilities by Ralph Mellor.
• Dynamic lexically scoped by Ralph Mellor.
• News to me by Patrick Spek.

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

• CroX::HTTP::Auth::Munge by Curt Tilmes.
• Hash::Agnostic, Object::Delayed by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Sparrowdo::Cordova::OSx::Fortify by Alexey Melezhik.
• Libui by Travis Gibson.
• Wkhtmltox by Ahmad M. Zawawi.
• App::Tasks by Joelle Maslak.
• Cro::RPC::JSON by Vadim Belman.

Updated Modules:

• GraphQL, epoll, DB::Pg by Curt Tilmes.
• Scalar::Util, Array::Agnostic, Array::Sparse, Object::Trampoline by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Getopt::Advance by araraloren.
• Sparrowdo::Cordova::OSx::Build by Alexey Melezhik.
• Image::Libexif by Fernando Santagata.
• JSON::Schema by Jonathan Worthington.
• Sparky::Plugin::Notify::Telegram by Spigell.
• PDF::Font::Loader by David Warring.
• JSON::Fast by Timo Paulsen.
• IRC::Client::Plugin::UrlTitle by Patrick Spek.

Winding Down

A week with relatively little happening in the Perl 6 core, but all the more outside of it, judging by the number of tweets and the number of new / updated modules in the ecosystem. With the release now out of the door, a backlog of optimizations will see the spotlight in the week to come. Hopefully giving some really good news next week. See you then!

2018.38 Three Versus Six

Patrick Spek has written a nice blog post about some Hackerrank solutions for Python 3 and Perl 6. Which created quite a few comments on /r/python, /r/programming and /r/perl6. For some people it provided a nice way to show off their versions of the code in question!

A new Oddmuse?

Something yours truly forgot to mention last week. Alex Schroeder has been thinking about re-implementing the Oddmuse wiki using Cro (FaceBook comments). Your views are very welcome!

Thoughts on sigils?

An interesting thread caused by the question: What are your thoughts on sigils? on Reddit. A good read, with even some APL mixed in.

Signatures in Perl 6

Yours truly had the fourth installment of her series on migrating code from Perl 5 to Perl 6 published on opensource.com. Which caused some comments on Reddit: /r/perl and /r/perl6.

The 128-Language Quine Relay

An interesting blog post on esoteric.codes of last April actually also contains Perl 6! As ab6tract noticed.

Core Developments

• Ticket status of last week.
• Ben Davies fixed a recent regression in state and once blocks.
• Paweł Murias fixed an optimizer issue related to +=. He also added a nqp::decodelocaltime NQP op.
• Stefan Seifert optimized booleanification at the NQP level, by a nqp::hllbool op that replaces the nqp::p6bool op.
• Zoffix Znet continued his preparatory work on the 6.d release of Perl 6, specifically in the area of cleaning up the test-suite (aka roast).
• Jeremy Studer provided a bunch more JIT templates.
• Tom Browder (partially) implemented the ‘#’ alias for %config :numbered.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen improved the speed of the various .lines and .words methods. She also introduced a PredictiveIterator role for those Iterators that can predict the number of values that they will produce, without actually having to produce them. She also generalized the use isms feature to also include use isms 'C++'.
• Samantha McVey implemented reading and writing files encoded in utf16 (machine order only). She’s also working on supporting utf16le and utf16be, and would like to have feedback on how to handle BOMs (aka ByteOrderMarkers). Comments welcome!
• Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev worked on improving the toaster to make things faster and more useful (failing modules are now bisected automatically). Still a work in progress. In the process Whateverable got a noticeable refactor to make parts of it reusable.
• And many other smaller fixes, improvements and speedups.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• If your only tool is a hammer… by Patrick Dreschler.
• Could be simplified by Moritz Lenz.
• Directly link to the docs by Timo Paulssen.
• Rule 34 by David Cantrell.
• Just like ordinary human beings by Zoffix Znet.
• Learning what not to do! by Joelle Maslak.
• También! by JJ Merelo.
• All the caveats by Zoffix Znet.
• 3D Printed Camelia by Zoffix Znet.
• 3D de-and re-construction by Flickrock.
• Make Perl 6 More Awesome? by Zoffix Znet.
• Work with an awesome team! by JJ Merelo.
• Quite Pretty by Timo Paulssen.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• How can I convert data structure to JSON? by Plaute.
• What is the equivalent of @INC, please? by p6steve.
• How to call Perl 6 from Java? by Steffen Winkler.
• How to use a constant value as a hash key by Simon Proctor.
• How to split a string based on comma, but not based on comma in double quote by chenyf.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• Damian in Frankfurt by Wendy van Dijk.
• Full House in Erlangen by Steffen Winkler.
• A Java developer asks me… by Steffen Winkler.
• Solutions in both Python 3 and Perl 6 by Wendy van Dijk.
• Pictures of Perl swag by Wendy van Dijk.
• 3D Camelia? by Wendy van Dijk.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Nil? by ToddAndMargo.
• Multibyte string in Windows command line by Wolfgang.
• .kv? by Todd Chester.
• .new? by Todd Chester.
• I need -M help by Todd Chester.
• Need Perl 5 / Perl 6 :: help by Todd Chester.
• -> by ToddAndMargo.
• Ping Larry and Friends: Need NativeCall help by ToddAndMargo.
• Tip: that annoying character at the end by ToddAndMargo.
• method vs multi method by ToddAndMargo.
• Can methods have multiple inputs? by ToddAndMargo.
• I need hash syntax help by ToddAndMargo.
• Need help with a variable inside a regex by ToddAndMargo.
• What is the official name of regex switches? by ToddAndMargo.
• Need regex help by ToddAndMargo.
• Escape codes by ToddAndMargo.
• Is this a bug? by Fernando Santagata.
• Information about Perl 6 internals by Fernando Santagata.
• Metamorphosis or alchemy? by ToddAndMargo.
• Rat by ToddAndMargo.

Perl  in comments

• My thoughts by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• A real concurrency-safe language by Reini Urban.
• Hit by optional white space by 0rac1e.
• Less disruptive by unkz.
• Almost trivial by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Would like a word by MDA1912.
• Perl 6? by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Do What I Mean by Ralph Mellor.
• Old benchmarks by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

• Router::Right by Konstantin Narkhov.
• Reaper::Control by Sam Gillespie.
• Whateverable by Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev.
• Array::Agnostic, Array::Sparse by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Modules:

• PDF::Font::Loader by David Warring.
• IRC::Client::Plugin::UrlTitle by Patrick Spek.
• Tuple, P5tie by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• App::FindSource, GetOpt::Advance by araraloren.
• Image::Libexif by Fernando Santagata.
• Sparrowdo::Cordova::OSx::Build by Alexey Melezhik.

Winding Down

Even though this week was a day shorter (on account of last week’s Perl 6 Weekly being a day late), there was plenty to mention and research. As you may have noticed. See you again next week!

2018.37 A DEtour of Damian

Out of the blue, or so it seemed, Damian Conway has appeared to do a Tour of Germany, giving presentations in Frankfurt, Erlangen, Dresden and Berlin. The last day will be a full-day Advanced Technical Presentation class (thanks to Strato AG). Entrance is always free, thanks to sponsoring by the Frankfurt Perl Mongers (FaceBook comments).

Linux packages updated

Thanks to the tireless work of Claudio Ramirez, the Linux packages for the Rakudo 2018.08 Compiler Release have been updated. Which now also include support for Alpine 3.8 and openSUSE 15.0. Check them out at https://github.com/nxadm/rakudo-pkg/.

Improved hygiene in JIT templating

After last week’s Rakudo Compiler release, Bart Wiegmans has merged a branch that provided many updates to the JIT expression template compiler in MoarVM. This should make it easier and less error-prone to write JIT expression templates, as he explains in a blog post.

What I did not steal from Perl 6

Ilya Sher, the author of the Next Generation Shell describes in his blog post things that he would (like to) steal from Perl 6, or not (Reddit comments).

Math::Matrix Introduction

Herbert Breunung introduces the Math::Matrix module in the first
blog post of a series (Reddit comments).

Tailgrepping Spinners

Brian Matatu has written a nice blog post about grepping the output of a tail -f (aka looking for things from a process that writes lines to standard output as they are written) (Reddit comments). Then Ralph Mellor took the idea to ask a question about the readability of the script. One interesting quote from the responses:

The start react ... whenever { } stuff looks interesting enough for me to stick this on my Big Pile of Stuff to Look intho, though.

Twisting the Rationals

Donaldh dug deeper into the performance of rational numbers (aka Rats) in a blog post titled A Twist To The Rational Story. It also showed a nice way to use a combination of [+] and race that yours truly hadn’t thought of yet!

Spotlight on Timo Paulssen

Timo Paulssen responded to a question on the new Curious Cat platform on how he got involved with Perl 6. He further described how he made videos of cellular automata in Perl 6. Interesting stuff!

Jo Christian Oterhals at it again!

The past week did not see 1, not 2 but 3 blog posts by Jo Christian Oterhals:

• Vantage points and the perception of speed (Reddit comments).
• Perception of speed — benchmarking grep.
• Q: How many seconds is a day? A: 86.400, 82.800 and 90.000.

All very interesting reads!

I Am Sparrowdo

Alexey Melezhik has written an introduction on how to use Sparrowdo on Windows. Cool to see a nice tool getting a proper introduction!

Swiss Perl Workshop

The past weekend also saw the Swiss Perl Workshop 2018. Separate videos of each presentation are not available yet, but since everything was live streamed, there are archives available of the raw streams: Day 1 and Day 2. Kudos to the SPW organizers and to Lee Johnson to make all of the streaming and recording seem so easy.

Core Developments

• Ticket status of past week.
• Since this weekly is already very late and very full, yours truly will summarize next week for two weeks.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Feels good! by ryn1x.
• Automated builds well worth it by Simon Proctor.
• Missing something? by Joelle Maslak.
• To Bern by Jonathan Worthington.
• It just makes sense by Simon Proctor.
• Incorrect assumptions by Zoffix Znet.
• Slides of SPW talks by Jonathan Worthington.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Simultaneous substitutions with s///? by lisprogtor.
• Traits, attributes, roles and closures by Vadim Belman.
• Useless use of LOOP_BLOCK_1 symbol in sink context by jja.
• Problem when using role between two modules by araraloren.
• How can I substitute in strings by codepoint rather than by grapheme? by Amir E. Aharoni.

Meanwhile on FaceBook

• Camelia Pin by Wendy van Dijk.
• Cro and Comma stickers by Wendy van Dijk.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Appropriate last words by Parrot Raiser.
• Handing over control by Parrot Raiser.
• Is Proxy a first class or not? by Ralph Mellor.
• WATs (Array[Str] vs Array and list vs scalar assignment) by Ralph Mellor.
• DefiniteHOW and SubsetHOW don’t support named parameters by Ralph Mellor.
• use Moo:from; by Ralph Mellor.
• Introducing P6 into a P5 user environment by Ralph Mellor.
• How to shield users from side effects of applying an attribute trait for a Moo like trigger by Ralph Mellor.
• perl6-users in groups.google.com by Ralph Mellor.
• Date conversions? by ToddAndMargo.
• RFE: contains documentation by ToddAndMargo.
• Case insensitive “contains“? by ToddAndMargo.
• “contains” beginning, end? by ToddAndMargo.
• Perl 6 Design specification? by ToddAndMargo.
• How do I do this index? by ToddAndMargo.
• Please explain this to me by ToddAndMargo.
• Functions and subroutines? by ToddAndMargo.
• A comparison between Perl 5 docs and Perl 6 docs by ToddAndMargo.

Perl 6 in comments

• Perl 6 as a counterargument by kbenson.
• Not to mention Perl 6 by StefanKarpinski.
• Same but different by saiftynet.
• I’ll be in the future by Aquila_Chrysaetos.
• Why aren’t more users happy? by bobthecimmerian.

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

• Native::Exec by Curt Tilmes.
• Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Update::Azure::SSL by Alexey Melezhik.

Updated Modules:

• App::Mi6 by Shoichi Kaji.
• Trait::Env by Simon Proctor.
• I18n::Simple by Patrick Spek.
• AttrX::Mooish by Vadim Belman.
• Hash-with by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• DB::Pg by Curt Tilmes.

Winding Down

So. Much. Happening. And not enough time. Hopefully next week’s Perl 6 Weekly will be more in time than this one. See you then!

2018.36 Normality Returns

A little later than originally anticipated, but Rakudo has had another compiler release: 2018.08, thanks to Samantha McVey (MoarVM release) and Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev. After it turned out impossible to make 2018.07 stable enough for a release, it was decided to scrap that release. The 2018.08 release had a few stability issues as well, but these were all fixed in the past week. This means we’re ready for a new round of optimizations to be tried and tested!

London Perl Workshop on 24 November

Due to a planning conflict, most notably with freenode #live, the London Perl Workshop has been moved from 3 November to 24 November. You can still submit your Perl 6 related presentation!

“Learning Perl 6” Available

brian d foy tells us that Learning Perl 6 is now available as ebook in various formats. Some reviews are already available. If you contributed to the Kickstarter, you should have been notified by now.

More about “AAA” .. “ABS” Strangeness

Jo Christian Oterhals continued his quest on finding the difference in behaviour of "AAA" .. "ABS" between Perl 5 and Perl 6 (FaceBook comments).

Containers in Perl 6

Elizabeth Mattijsen had part 3 of her series on the differences between Perl 5 and Perl 6 published on opensource.com (Reddit comments).

Faster FASTA

Timo Paulssen got triggered by a question on StackOverflow, did some research which resulted in an excellent blog post (Reddit comments).

Awesome and Fascinating

Those were the words that Mr. Spaz used to describe a presentation about Perl 6 that JJ Merelo gave at the ZipRecruiter offices to the Los Angeles Perl Mongers: There’s-a.new(:Perl).in-town().

One Year Of Squashathon

Although the past weekend’s documentation Squashathon wasn’t such a big success, it was the 13th Squashathon in a row. Which means we have now over a year of Squashathons! Kudos again to Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev for setting all of this in motion!

Core Developments

• Ticket status of last week and the month of August.
• Jeremy Studer made sure that initializing a native array with a lazy Seq, or splicing a lazy Seq into a native array, throws immediately.
• Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev removed support for $*INITTIME, as was promised in the deprecation message.
• ribbon-otter supplied code that allows support for all coloncircumfix in the form 42.:<->.
• ryn1x made sure that Regex.ACCEPTS(Uni) sets $/ as expected.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made sure that Seqs smartmatch Iterables correctly. She made it also possible to emit Mu values.
• And some other smaller fixes and improvements.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Ask and you might get it by Joelle Maslak.
• Jonathan Keynote Speaker by perlcon.
• Easier Testing by Joelle Maslak.
• Worst misunderstandings fixed by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• Depend on a Perl 6 Application by Joelle Maslak.
• Subjects for articles on Perl.com by brian d foy.
• Gather is cool by Joelle Maslak.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• stat function by User9102d82.
• Comparing 2 data sets possibly with concurrency/asynchronous/parallel approach by User9102d82.
• Coercion/type checking – manually reproduce Perl 6 standards by Vadim Belman.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• A grammar to provide substitution by Patrick Spek.
• Introspection by Parrot Raiser.
• Coercion/type checking – manually reproduce Perl 6 standards by Vadim Belman.
• Missing or wrong version of dependency by Peter Scott.

Perl 6 in comments

• Not doing Perl 5/Perl 6 by bradfitz.
• Language Upgrades by antod.
• Drawn Out Changes by mikekchar.
• Even rhetorical questions get hostile answers by Ralph Mellor.
• You reappear here by BrowserUk.
• Promoting Perl 6 for 10 years by LanX.

Perl Modules

New Modules:

• Text::I18n, I18n::Simple by Patrick Spek.
• CompUnit::Repository::Github by Nick Logan.
• Rat::Precise by Steve Schulze.

Updated Modules:

• String::Fold, App::Assixt by Patrick Spek.
• App::Platform by Jarkko Haapalainen.
• Trait::Env by Simon Proctor.
• AttrX::Mooish by Vadim Belman.
• Async::Command, KHPH by Mark Devine.
• HTTP::Tinyish by Shoichi Kaji.

Winding Down

It’s good to be back home and be able to write the Perl 6 Weekly in a familiar surrounding for a change. Next week’s Perl 6 Weekly will be coming from somewhere near Switzerland, while returning from the Swiss Perl Workshop. See you next week!