Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev and Samantha McVey have released the 2018.11 Rakudo Compiler, which is the first Rakudo compiler release that standardizes on Perl 6.d, the second major version of Perl 6 (PDF version).  Claudio Ramirez immediately followed up on that with an update of all of the Linux packages. 

So why is this important?  After all, most of the 6.d changes had already been active in previous Rakudo compiler releases.  Therefore one should really look at the list of version controlled changes.  From a performance point of view for heavily concurrent programs, making await non-blocking by default is probably the most important. 

In Perl 6.d you can easily run many thousands of simultaneous jobs.  That’s because if something is awaiting an external result, it will no longer block the thread it is in (which it did in Perl 6.c, severely limiting doing many asynchronous operations simultaneously and adding a very real possibility of deadlocking).  Instead it now relinquishes control of the thread so another job can make use of it. 

Easily run examples from documentation

Aaron Sherman thinks it would be a good idea to add links to 6pad from the Perl 6 documentation.  Additional comments / views welcome! 

German Perl Workshop

The dates for the German Perl Workshop 2019 have been set: 6 – 8 March in Munich at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften München.  There’s a list of suggested talk subjects and a CFP.  Please submit your Perl 6 talk proposal: Munich is a cool city and the German Perl Workshop is one of the oldest Perl Workshops in the world! 

The Perl Conference in Pittsburgh

The website for the Perl Conference 2019 is now live: it will be held from 16 to 21 June at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel & Suites Pittsburgh Downtown in Pittsburgh, PA.  Talk proposals can be submitted from the 15th of December, so you will have to be a little patient! 

Perl at 35C3

Perl will be present at the 35th Chaos Computer Congress from 27 to 30 December in Leipzig.  Kudos to all the people making that happen.  It’s too late to get tickets now.  But if you already have a ticket and want to help, check out the #35c3 IRC channel on irc.perl.org . 

YAPC::Tokyo 2019

Almost slipped by without yours truly noticing: the YAPC::Tokyo 2019 on 26 January 2019.  With some Perl 6 related talks:

Perl in the winter of 2019 by Kenichi Ishigaki. 

Application Development in Perl 6 by risou. 

Revive to modern Perl by 八雲アナグラ.

You will need to brush up on your Japanese though, by the looks of it. 

Tis the time of year

This year, Perl does not have 1 but 2 Advent calendars: the tenth edition of the Perl 6 Advent Calendar (which is a community effort) and the first edition of the Perl 6 One-Liner Advent Calendar (by Andrew Shitov).  So what are the posts so far? 

Perl 6 Advent Calendar:

Perl 6 One-Liner Advent Calendar:

Regexes and guesses

Jo Christian Oterhals has published another story about his use of Perl 6: Small stuff #14: Regexes and guesses (name extraction).  If you don’t learn anything about Perl 6 there (which yours truly finds unlikely), you will at least learn about the difference between Bokmål and Nynorsk ! 

Go 2, here we come! 

Robert Griesemer has published a blog post about the future of Go: Go 2, here we come.  In an earlier version, this contained the phrase “Don’t be Perl 6”.  This caused quite some discussion about Perl 6 on Reddit and Hacker News.  Read at your own peril. 

Haskell to Perl 6

voihannena posted a link to the Haskell to Perl 6 documentation page, which spurred a top-20 place on the Hacker News front page and a quite some positive (and some negative) comments.  An interesting read if you want to know about how some people look at Perl 6. 

Core Developments

Ticket status: last week, the week before that and the month of November. 

Timo Paulssen fixed a memory leak with spesh logging on long running (otherwise idle) processes such as a Cro app.  He also micro-optimized an internal Match method that may be noticeable when using a lot of regular expressions in a program. 

app.  He also micro-optimized an internal method that may be noticeable when using a lot of regular expressions in a program.  Samantha McVey fixed a lot of build warnings on MoarVM.  She also worked on improving building of MoarVM on AIX systems. 

Ben Davies fixed a double free. 

Petr Rockai fixed a file-descriptor leak by adding a cancel handler for filewatch tasks.  And fixed an unnecessary warning in IO::Notification . 

.  Stefan Seifert fixed a problem with writing bytecode on big-endian systems, recently introduced by the MAST-stage refactor. 

Paweł Murias did a lot of work on the Javascript backend, about which he reported very succinctly. 

of work on the Javascript backend, about which he reported very succinctly.  Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed a few edge cases with set operators.  She also made Attribute ‘s get_value and set_value fully transparent. 

‘s and fully transparent.  And many other smaller fixes and improvements. 

Questions about Perl 6

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on FaceBook

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Perl 6 in comments

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

Duo by Lucas Buchala. 

Protocol by Fernando Correa de Oliveira. 

RandomColor by Clifton Wood. 

Algorithm::LDA by Itsuki Toyota. 

DateTime::Monotonic by Joelle Maslak. 

Updated Modues:

Uzu by Sam Morrison. 

App::Tasks by Joelle Maslak. 

Inline::Perl5 by Stefan Seifert. 

SQL::Lexer by dmaestro. 

Cro, Cro::Core, Cro::HTTP, Cro::TLS, Cro::WebSocket by Jonathan Worthington. 

Terminal::Spinners by ryn1x. 

Chart::Gnuplot by Itsuki Toyota. 

Math::FFT::Libfftw3 by Fernando Santagata. 

PDF::Class, HTML::Canvas, Font::Freetype, PDF::ISO_32000 by David Warring. 

Sparrowdo, Sparky by Alexey Melezhik. 

Winding Down

Due to being down with the flu, yours truly could not make a Perl 6 Weekly last week.  So therefore this week’s covers two weeks of events in the Perl 6 universe.  Hope to see you next week for yet another batch of Perl 6 goodies!