roast VS Inline-Perl5

Add more IO::Path::parent tests #801: merged 2022-02-19

23. Raku - $79,448

Pakku is a package manager for the Raku Programming Language. Latest releases of Pakku are part of Pakku Celastrina version family. Celastrina name means elegant and beutiful, So I will take the opportunity to introduce how elegant IMO Pakku handles Raku distributions.

At the last European Perl Conference I proposed to change the name of "Perl 6". After a lot of discussion, it was decided that it was going to be called the Raku Programming Language.

Raku note: This language has no length method on strings, because in Unicode world it is super confusing. Instead there are separate methods to ask precisely about amount of characters, amount of code points and amount of bytes.

Elizabeth Mattijsen reports on all recent developments around Rakudo, an implementation of the Raku Programming Language.

The raku.org website.

This became one of the first things that needed to be done, to be able to say the new implementation would be matching the old. During the development of these tests, it became clear there were some inconsistencies in the existing implementation, and worse: outright bugs.

Verbatim from the documentation at https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5: use Inline::Perl5;

> Perl 6 was treated as the successor of Perl 5 -- and that was the mistake. It meant Perl 5 started dying,

Perl 6 took a long time to make, but how much did that matter? What was Perl going to do about Rails, Clojure, Go, Rust, JS/TS, and more? The world of programming languages used to be a lot smaller than it is today.

> Perl 6 had a new different syntax.

Inline::Perl5 [3] allows running legacy Perl 5 code in Perl 6 codebases.

[1]: https://docs.raku.org/language/5to6-nutshell#Regular_express...

[2]: https://github.com/atweiden/voidvault

[3]: https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5

Perl can be faster and defiantly nicer to work with than PHP but it's nowhere near as fast as some other options like Rust but that has the downside of being much harder to write and get working. Perl has the advantage of being prepackaged with the base system and on OpenBSD it's kept up fairly well with the system version currently being only one version behind the latest yearly Perl release. There are some patches added to the OpenBSD version so updating it each year takes time. The easiest way that I've found for running Perl websites is to leave the system modules as is and to install all of the modules that you need into a users home directory with local::lib and cpanm. That way the system install isn't contaminated with the extra modules and it makes deploying easy because it's all contained in one users home directory that can be rsync'd or tar'd. Another nice thing is you get access to pledge and unveil through Perl so you can lock down your website even further. I've recently been trying out doing things in Raku (Perl6 was renamed to Raku in 2019). It's slower than Perl most of the time but I find Raku to be so much more beautiful and expressive that it's a joy to code with. There aren't as many modules available right now for Raku but it gives you access to all of CPAN through the Inline::Perl5 module.

Interfacing with Perl 5 with Inline::Perl5:

I'll be happy to dialog about this compatibility, but the key thing is to start with an open mind; a recognition that the original vision predated Parrot; and a recognition that Rakoons have never relinquished that original vision even while many of us are delighted that Perl folk are keeping Perl healthy as a separate thing in its own right.

To be clear, the realization of Larry's original vision is not constrained to interop with Perl. Raku has extraordinary potential, some already realized, for pan-language compatibility via its [Inlines](https://modules.raku.org/search/?q=inline).

The steady improvement of [the exemplar Inline](https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5) for the last 6 years; its evident maturing; its suitability as a solid blueprint for upgrading all the others; all of this bodes well for being able to use a lot of the world's best existing code from within Raku this decade, with Inline::Python quite plausibly shining in this regard within the next 2-3 years.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/45181464/1077672

The most polished of the Inlines, namely Inline::Perl5 (github repo) enables devs to instantiate Raku objects that are instances of Raku classes that are sub-classes of Perl classes. It does this even though Perl has pluggable OO, essentially arbitrary OO, with dozens of different OO systems available, all of which differ from Raku's, for example having a variety of MRO linearizations that aren't C3. So such things can be done.