The Second Raku Core Summit

Some background

The Raku Core Summit was the culmination of several ideas I had after the Covid lockdowns took place. Having been involved in the organization of two European conferences (with 300+ people attending), many workshops and hackathons (with up to 100+ people attending), and many open source conference booths (most notably FOSDEM, OSCON, Froscon and T-Dose). We also attended several toolchain summits, where Wendy excelled in the catering needs of the attendees. I felt that the Raku Programming Language also needed some type of meeting of Raku people in real life. So that people who regularly, if not daily, meet online to work on the Raku Programming Language could also meet in person.

So I convinced Wendy in 2023 to organize a Raku Core Summit in our house in Echt. I templated this after the toolchain summits that Wendy and I had attended in the past. And at which Wendy has always been providing good and healthy food, instead of the (cold) pizza-driven hackathons of old!

In June 2023, it really happened! Three+ days of discussions, hacking, making plans and finally having some quality time to work on something that has been bugging for a long time. The weather was nice enough to sit outside, so it was easy to form subgroups with particular interests, and the catering by Wendy was excellent, as always. And a good time was had by all!

Sadly it turned out to be impossible for Wendy and me to organize another one in 2024. And nobody else did either, for well understood reasons. But early in 2025 when it became clear to me that we could organize another Raku Core Summit in 2025, I tried to convince Wendy that that would be a cool thing to do again. Begrudingly, she agreed.

The second one

And so the second Raku Core Summit happened roughly from 6 - 9 June, with the first people arriving on the 5th of June.

When fixing the date of the second Raku Core Summit, I realized much too late that it actually was on the Pentecost weekend. I had been going for a June date, and not too close to the TPRC. This meant that trying to organize lodging for some of the attendees was a bit more difficult than it was 2 years ago. Finally I settled on renting a chalet in a nearby vacation centre, which would allow for some flexibility with regards to the number of attendees without adding unnecessary complexity.

Since some of the attendees are vegan, it is always a bit of an issue finding a restaurant for dinner that would be acceptable. When we recently found out that a local truckers restaurant also had gotten a vegan dish option (Op de Vos, in Sittard), I tried to book there: but I was also too late. So we settled on the Indian restaurant (Taste of India, in Tüddern), and the Italian restaurant down the street (Pietro's) that we had also visited the last time. The final night, Wendy cooked us a very nice vegan dish at home. Which was chosen as the best meal of the whole summit by some of the attendees!

The beginning

The original planning was to have 9 attendees (plus Wendy and me). Alas, life intervenes: in the end, only 6 people could make it. Which may have been a blessing, since this time the weather was decidedly much colder than it was with the first summit (and below average for the time of the year), and decidedly much wetter and much windier. So sitting outside was just not an option most of the time. Although the house Wendy and I live in, is pretty big: having 8 people hanging around for 3 days in a row inside, felt a bit too crowded. It would have been worse with 11.

People flying in generally can reach us by public transport without too many issues: we live about 300 meter from a (small) train station, and Dutch railways are known for their service and punctuality. But not on Friday the 6th: country-wide strike! And one attendee arriving by plane on Schiphol on the 6th! Getting from Schiphol to our place by train on that day, would have meant taking the international train (which was still running) to Brussels, then a train to Liège, then Maastricht and then Echt. Which might have worked, had there been seats left on the international train. And taking a bus (actually many buses), would have meant a 10+ hour, very uncomfortable trip. So this meant that I drove to Schiphol to pick up the attendee, and drive back. In total, that was a 5 hour drive, also thanks to the traffic jams caused by the extra traffic because the trains were on strike.

Many attendees already discussed and hacked away on Friday, when I was on the road and needed to get the key of the chalet (which turned out to be another traffic jam with other people waiting to get their key for a long Pentecost weekend with the family at this vacation resort). So sadly I could not participate much in those discussions, as I was pretty zonked out from driving all day.

Fortunately, to make sure everybody would have enough time to work on things they would like to work on, Will Coleda had 3D-printed some very nice commemorative "tuits".

After everybody settled in at a nice pre-event social, things were ready to get started the next day!

Saturday

After a copious breakfast by Wendy, discussions were ready to start.

Under guidance of Patrick Böker we settled on a list of subjects for discussion. This was the list:

• Raku 6.e
• RakuAST
• Querying the AST
• Providing grammars for popular formats
• Speeding up NFAs / Grammars
• Speeding up UTF8 decoding / normalization
• Unicode updates
• RakuDoc for modules
• Debugger
• Documentation
• Varargs in NativeCall
• How to increase Raku Adoption
• Future role of Liz
• Raku Foundation
• Visions of Raku
• Rakudo backends
• Improving our websites

Much of the morning was spent on discussing some of these subjects. But quite some hacking was also involved!

Sunday and Monday

These two days were mostly spent on hacking and ad-hoc discussions in smaller groups.

As usual, Wendy did an excellent job keeping everybody well fed and awake (by supplying copious amounts of tea, coffee and exotic types of cola).

Tuesday

Some attendees had to leave on Monday already. And courtesy of the unions and the Dutch railways, trains were on strike again on Tuesday. So the attendees flying back from Schiphol to the US were brought there by car, this time with Wendy coming along as well. After dropping them of at Schiphol at a reasonable time (by using some cunning shortcuts near Schiphol), Wendy and I decided on a little tour of the Netherlands, visiting familiar places and shops in Amsterdam and Nijmegen, before heading back home later in the evening.

Life returning to normal

Looking back, it was a very packed week for Wendy and me, with lots of nice experiences! And with some good Raku work done. More on that in a next blog post about this Raku Core Summit.

And of course the weather cleared up the next day.