Will Coleda (with help by Justin DeVuyst) has produced the first release of the Rakudo compiler for the Raku Programming Language in 2025: 2025.01. Quite a few stability improvements in MoarVM, some performance enhancements and a few additions. Binary packages will become available shortly, as well as updates to Rakudo Star, if they are not already. Kudos to all involved! And good to see the bus factor increased!

Alexey’s Corner

Alexey Melezhik has published 3 blogs posts in the past week:

• Developing a simple Sparrow plugin with Raku and Bash
• Simple search in source code with Tomtit and Sparrow
• Useful terminal plugins to build golang code

Elizabeth’s Corner

Elizabeth Mattijsen has published part 3 in the Towards more coverage blog series: Creating coverage information.

Anton’s Corner

Anton Antonov has made another neat video: Number theory neat examples Set 1!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #306 is available for your perusal.

New Problem Solving Issues

• Thoughts on an RFD (request for discussion) process
• Add the modf routine to the core language
• use isms should be default in 6.e

New Pull Requests

• Update many Perl 6 -> Rakudo
• Make accesses to spesh arg guard atomic

Core Developments

• Daniel Green changed the hash logic on MoarVM to use rapidhash (instead of siphash), bumped libuv to 1.50.0, and micro-optimized the finding character classes logic.
• Timo Paulssen micro-optimized the NativeCall interface, counteracted drift in repeated timers and added a “loaded file notification” message to the debugserver.
• Nick Logan enabled experimental c11 atomics on MSVC.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed several issues with the .clone method on Array, Hash, Map, Date, and DateTime objects, and simplified standard instance creation by introducing a POPULATE method.

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• Third blog by Wendy van Dijk.
• Still like the syntax by Patrick Spek.

Meanwhile on Bluesky

Yours truly has opened an account on Bluesky and will be following the #rakulang tag there. Some references from the last month:

• An ATProto client by Jonathan Stowe.
• A nice write up by Simon Proctor.

Questions about Raku

• GENERATE-USAGE not being called by zeekar.
• Inheriting from Array: construction by fingolfin.
• ɦow to build rαku which considers 0xABCDEF.89A and 0xYJQWPF.89P as Rat rationals by ztrabc.

Comments about Raku

• Gradual typing may be to your taste by nagaiaida.
• On versioning by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

New Raku Modules

• Archive::Ar “Unix ar archive interface” by Samuel Young.

Updated Raku Modules

• Prompt::Expand, Commands, App::Ecosystems, REPL, Code::Coverage by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Math::NumberTheory, Data::Translators, JavaScript::D3 by Anton Antonov.
• CSS::Grammar, CSS::Specification, CSS::Module by David Warring.
• App::Stouch, App::Ebread by Samuel Young.
• GEOS, WebService::Overpass, WebService::Nominatim, Map::Leaflet, Map::DeckGL, Duckie by Brian Duggan.
• Tomtit, Tomty by Alexey Melezhik.
• Data::Dump by Tony O’Dell.
• Rakuast::RakuDoc::Render by Richard Hainsworth.

Winding down

On a personal note: yours truly has de-activated their account on Twitter. Enough is enough. This also means that news about the Raku Programming Language on Twitter will no longer be seen, unless someone makes it known to yours truly in some other manner.

Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work! Even after week 1 of hopefully only 209.

Meanwhile, still: Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

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