On these last days of 2024, Anton Antonov continued their neat blogging spree in “Sparse Matrix Neat Examples in Raku“, this time mixing The Lord of the Rings, X-Men and Pirates of the Caribbean.

Adventing

The final 2 blog posts this year’s Advent Calendar:

• Day 24 – In Search of the Essence of Raku by Donald Hunter.
• Day 25 – Raku 2024 Review by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

There’s also a handy overview of all Raku advent posts of 2024.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #302 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• Use 64 bit ints in decoder
• Beautify release_guide.md

Core Developments

• Timo Paulssen added guards on MoarVM and NQP to catch unexpected / seemingly impossible out-of-bounds issues.
• Nick Logan fixed a race-issue in the loaded module administration, and made CI testing test all of roast again.
• Christian Bartolomäus fixed a NullPointerException on the JVM backend.

In RakuAST:

• Elizabeth Mattijsen added the letters A, P, and Δ to the RakuDoc markup letters that can have meta information.

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• Stuff to make us proud by Wendy van Dijk.
• Some thoughts on Dormitory by Alexey Melezhik.
• A huge thanks! by Samuel Chase.

Questions about Raku

• Anyone have experience with GPTrixie to aid with NativeCall? by BaileysHuman.

Comments about Raku

• A new logo for Perl on Hacker News.
• Like the Raku version by darrenf.
• Subsets can do this by riffraff.
• On mutating and non-mutating by Ralph Mellor.
• Reminds me of Raku by klibertp.
• Crazy and fun by mempko.
• A bastard child by Steve Roe.
• It’s a disaster by BoingBoomTschak.

New Raku Modules

• Math::Splines “Package for splines (piecewise polynomials), like, Bezier splines or B-splines” by Anton Antonov.
• Code::Coverable “Produce overview of coverable lines of code” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• SHAI “shai (SHell AI) – ask for LLM-powered shell commands” by Nigel Hamilton.
• Code::Coverage “Produce code coverage reports” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• auto-dynamic “Automatically vivify dynamic variables” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• App::pack.raku “Handle Gnome plugins” by Francis Smit.
• Text::Emoji “Provide :text: to emoji translation” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Map::Leaflet “Generate Leaflet maps” by Brian Duggan.

Updated Raku Modules

• PDF::Content, HarfBuzz by David Warring.
• Email::SendGrid, Wasm::Emitter, BigRoot, Statistics::LinearRegression, overload::constant, MoarVM::Bytecode, WWW::DuckDuckGo, Text::LDIF, ASCII::To::Uni, JSON::Unmarshal, if, Acme::Anguish, Algorithm::Diff by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Graph, Jupyter::Chatbook by Anton Antonov.
• HTML::Functional by Steve Roe.
• Rakuast::RakuDoc::Render by Richard Hainsworth.
• App::Ebread, App::Stouch by Samuel Young.
• GeoIP2 by Paweł Pabian.
• WebService::Overpass by Brian Duggan.

Winding down

A record in cool new modules! And the end of a turbulent year. With most likely more turbulence ahead in 2025. Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work!

Meanwhile, still: Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

If you like what I’m doing, committing to a small sponsorship would mean a great deal!