roast VS rakudo

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.

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.)