metacpan-web VS rakudo

In January 2018, I proposed a CPAN Butterfly Plan to convert Perl functionality to Raku as closely as possible to the original API. I stated this as a goal because Perl (as a programming language) is so much more than syntax alone. Ask anyone what Perl's unique selling point is, and they will most likely tell you it is CPAN.

MetaCPAN. There are a number of project in the Perl community. This is one of the most interesting ones. source code

Perl has numerous modules for practically everything. Try a search on https://metacpan.org for anything that takes your fancy.

I can point to the module library metacpan.org that has modules to do tons of different things -- I don't know what equivalent resouorce Python has.

A good place for this issue would be https://github.com/metacpan/metacpan-web

All language package index websites are a poor imitation of metacpan.org. Without a doubt it is the single best package website I have used for finding packages, reading docs, examples, version changes, source repo. Everybody should be shamelessly copying it.

While the indicates that this is a Windows-related thing, there are a number of packages on CPAN that are in the Win32 namespace, but also work on Linux. This one, it seems does not. It seems at least one of its dependencies, the Win32-API does not work on anything else besides Windows.

A Perl distribution is an archive of files that includes a Perl module. There are no official rules on what non-module files must be included in a distribution, but they often include (among other things) test scripts, a Makefile.PL, documentation, and the license. These distributions are commonly uploaded to CPAN, which is a place for Perl programmers to upload their Perl distributions for the purpose of sharing their code.

If there are modules being used, you can read their documentation using the perldoc command or looking online at https://metacpan.org

Fix IO::Path::parent #4795: merged 2022-02-19 Add more IO::Path::parent tests #801: merged 2022-02-19 Change parent to always just remove the last element #4800: merged 2022-02-26 Change .parent behavior to "stupid" resolving #802: merged 2022-02-26

This then became the Formatter class. And since this was a completely new feature, it only became available for use by opting into the 6.e.PREVIEW language version. And then it went largely unnoticed and uncared for the next 1.5 year. As clearly the time wasn't right for it yet.

The intended audience are those people willing to be early adopters of these exciting new features in the Raku Programming Language. The examples in this blog post will work in the next release of the Rakudo compiler (probably 2023.06), but are now already available in the bleeding edge version.

If you really want to look at this, you can find the code in src/Perl6/Grammar.nqp, src/Perl6/Actions.nqp and src/Perl6/World.nqp.

If you find this very interesting, you probably want to read the RakuAST README. And the actual source code of the RakuAST classes can be found in the same directory. And if you're really feeling adventurous and you have the Rakudo repository checked out, you can have a look at the generated NQP code in gen/moar/ast.nqp.

Yes, it would. But until there was RakuAST, that was virtually impossible to do because there was no proper API for building ASTs. Nor was there an interface to execute those ASTs. And now that there is RakuAST, it is actually possible to do this. And there is actually already an implementation of that idea in the new Formatter class. Although this is definitely not intended as an entry point into grokking RakuAST.

I have opened one. https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/issues/5205.

Will Coleda has made a Pull Request

There's an issue pertaining to this. This is something I'd like to resolve, but I'm unsure on how to better debug this to see if it really is the deserialization of a setting file triggering it. JDK 11 should at least be capable of building Rakudo, but being an experimental backend people don't always align with MoarVM immediately, I can't make any guarantees about tests. You may be disappointed in its performance at the moment.

(NB. While the PL is just a toy (and just a tiny bit of the toy too), the tech is actually industrial strength, used to power the production Raku compiler, which is written in Raku using its grammar construct. Starting easy doesn't mean you can't go far. Quite the opposite in fact -- you can go as far as you want.)