Rakudo compiler, Release #147 (2021.06)

2021-06-19

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I’m very happy to announce the June 2021 release of Rakudo #147. Rakudo is an implementation of the Raku1 language.

The source tarball for this release is available from https://rakudo.org/files/rakudo. Pre-compiled archives will be available shortly.

New in 2021.06:

  • Additions:
    • Support generics with consumption and inheritance in roles [4b996568][6e1cfe4c]
    • Introduce done foo syntax as a shortcut for emit foo; done [452e92ed]
    • Implement pick method on Any taking HyperWhatever as an argument (.pick(**)), which produce all values of Foo.pick(), and then produce all values of Foo.pick() again, and again, ad infinitum [cd4a72b6]
    • Add a repl sub to enter the REPL from within a program [4183cdaf]
    • Add Buf and Blob coercers to Blob and Buf roles [f83e5511]
  • Changes:
    • No longer use Unicode in REPL on Windows [5e1c97ba]
  • Efficiency:
    • Tweak worker addition for many small tasks [39e5834d]
    • Make .grep(Regex) and .first(Regex) about 40% faster [0de28ae7]
    • Speed up setup of NativeCall subs and reduce memory usage [3b7fef2e]
    • Micro-optimize levenshtein sub used to suggest alternatives in error messages [da0f561c]
  • Fixes:
    • Improve stability on Windows by trying to rename precomp files multiple times [a9510b8d][7dfed29c]
    • Fix bogus "emit without supply or react" error when using hyper to process arrays [4953a299]
    • Fix some edge cases with (+), (.), (&) and (|) set operators [89fd8a8d]
    • Make signature destructuring with a Junction an error [15d372e2][57070f05]
    • Make Mu eqv Mu work [750c5d04]
    • Fix possible error when throwing an exception on JVM backend [9743035f]
  • Internals:
    • Provide support for CORE:: namespace for the core itself [ea92934c][3fcf6f75][b03afef5]
    • Remove a special case for native arrays on JVM [28ff12a8]
    • Simplify Iterable eqv Iterable implementation [168da39a]
    • Abstract single elem path of [] into Rakudo::Internals [db074a8b]

The following people contributed to this release:

Daniel Green, Elizabeth Mattijsen, Stoned Elipot, Tom Browder, Christian Bartolomäus, Will "Coke" Coleda, Juan Julián Merelo Guervós, Vadim Belman, Jonathan Worthington, Stefan Seifert, Bruce Gray, Nguyễn Gia Phong, Gianni Ceccarelli, Stéphane Payrard, chirvasitua, rir, Alexander Kiryuhin

This release implements 6.c and 6.d versions of the Raku specification. 6.c version of the language is available if you use the use v6.c version pragma, otherwise 6.d is the default.

Upcoming releases in 2021 will include new functionality that is not part of 6.c or 6.d specifications, available with a lexically scoped pragma. Our goal is to ensure that anything that is tested as part of 6.c and 6.d specifications will continue to work unchanged. There may be incremental spec releases this year as well.

If you would like to contribute or get more information, visit https://raku.org, https://rakudo.org/community, ask on the [email protected] mailing list, or ask on IRC #raku on freenode.

Additionally, we invite you to make a donation to The Perl Foundation to sponsor Raku development: https://donate.perlfoundation.org/ (put “Raku Core Development Fund” in the ‘Purpose’ text field)

The next release of Rakudo (#148), is tentatively scheduled for 2021-07-23.

A list of the other planned release dates is available in the “docs/release_guide.pod” file.

The development team appreciates feedback! If you’re using Rakudo, do get back to us. Questions, comments, suggestions for improvements, cool discoveries, incredible hacks, or any other feedback – get in touch with us through (the above-mentioned) mailing list or IRC channel. Enjoy!

Please note that recent releases have known issues running on the JVM. We are working to get the JVM backend working again but do not yet have an estimated delivery date.

  1. See https://raku.org/ ↩