Jonathan Worthington has focused his attention on
hyper, two ways of making your code run in parallel more or less automatically. In his most recent blog post he describes the history behind
race, and how he is (re-) considering the exact semantics for the coming
6.d version of Perl 6. Please check out this spreadsheet and let him know what you think about it.
And Yet Another Compiler Release
It was that time of the month again. Zoffix Znet and his trusty bots released Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, Release #109 (aka 2017.03). It’s getting almost as normal as landing a first stage rocket in your back garden. Anyways, this release has fixed the lexical module loading bug, which changes the way symbols exposed by a module are visible in your code. This was announced last December. Should you not have changed your code yet to take this bug fix into account, you can take a look at the Lexical require upgrade info, posted by Zoffix Znet.
- Samantha McVey made case-insensitive regex matching better and 20%-30% faster by using foldcase internally in a smarter way.
- AlexDaniel noticed that
was not properly set up for handling lambda’s, and knew how to fix that as well.
- After much discussion, Zoffix Znet removed support for the special
⁇ ‼Unicode ternary operator. No worries,
?? !!are still there!
- Zoffix Znet also fixed an issue with
mapwith blocks that are guaranteed not to return a
Slip. And also made
IO::Pipe.lines3x faster by removing code as part of the work on the IO grant.
- Timo Paulssen fixed an issue with
nqp::p6boolwhich wasn’t aware of the existence of native variables, causing unnecessary boxing/unboxing.
- Elizabeth Mattijsen made the
Cooltypes about 1.8x faster, which should cause an improvement when using
Bags and object hashes. She also fixed an issue with
- Fernando Correa fixed an issue with flattening in a triangular reduce using
Strinfinilooping in multiple dispatch.
- Daniel Green fixed an issue with the
- And of course many other smaller improvements and bug fixes!
- Plotting using Matplotlib and Inline::Python by Moritz Lenz.
- What Is The Future Of The Perl Language Beyond 2017 by Quora (Reddit comments).
- The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y” by Erik Bern (Reddit comments).
- Perl 6 Book by Enkidu.
- “No fetching backend available” when using zef by elbitjusticiero.
- Install Rakudo Perl 6 on remote host with Sparrowdo by Alexey Melezhik.
Meanwhile on Twitter
- Easy install Perl 6 apps by Zoffix Znet.
- Mathematically correct code by Jeffrey Goff.
- Perl 6 Support on repl.it by replit.
- Just presented sparrowdo by Alexey Melezhik.
- Perl 6 from system packages not always a good idea by Zoffix Znet.
- Named parameter keyed to the name of the variable by Zoffix Znet.
Meanwhile on StackOverflow
- How do I write micro-grammars in perl 6? by blippy.
- Wrapping a method using several source files by Stamm.
An interesting addition for packaging up your applications, an easier way to do an HTTP client, and an interface to
Still very busy. Even though it apparently is spring now, it feels more like autumn. Let the sunshine in! See you next week, for more Perl 6 news.