Rakudo compiler, Release #148 (2021.07)

2021-07-24

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I’m very happy to announce the July 2021 release of Rakudo #148. Rakudo is an implementation of the Raku1 language.

This release deprecates Proc.status method (use signal and exitcode instead), improves map performance, improves the cmp routine to support more things and includes some nice fixes. On top of that we now offer an MSI installer for monthly releases!

Detailed changes in 2021.07:

  • Additions:
    • Make cmp routine work properly on Iterator, Seq, Uni, native arrays and empty Lists [efb3116a][f3ff0621][76714ca4][39ba8884]
    • Add the ACCEPTS(Uni) method on Uni candidate [6b6459f3]
    • Implement last and next with a value for 6.e language revision [402ea056][2542a0ac][a5d81353][0761d4b2][47ebc86c][a2faac4b] [e777fc4f][4f190875][21576423]
    • Properly support nearly all HTML5 entities in Pod E<> formatting code [910179d7]
    • Allow Ctrl-C to stop entry in REPL [cf7b4f18]
    • Add ⩶ and ⩵ as Unicode synonyms for === and == [eab780f3]
  • Deprecations:
    • Deprecate the status method on Proc in place of exitcode and signal methods [249fdba2][2fd458cc]
  • Build System:
    • Tidy and improve cleanup rules [e771bd8a]
    • Support creating an MSI installer [4e93b84e]
  • Changes:
    • Allow add method on IO::Path to take multiple values (e.g. "foo".IO.add(<bar baz>)) [b4d33982]
  • Efficiency:
    • Optimize calls to map [a8f144cc][38626c68]
    • Optimize loops without phasers for one and two arguments case [265888ce]
    • Make for / map with 2+ arguments up to 2x as fast [4c417f31][4f5fb9e6][bfa6b295]
    • Make List cmp List about 25% faster [50bd1717]
    • Reduce overhead of loops with phasers by at least 5% [5ecc8308][7a1b729b]
    • Make the grep(Callable) method about 3% faster [52ffc125][bb09bbb8][71f6bada]
  • Fixes:
    • Fix rakuw.exe to be a non-console app [57885f66]
    • Fix CURI probing and installation edge case issue on Windows [2839cef6][d668d992]
    • Clean up sockets created by IO::Socket::INET.new on error [bee5c7af][271f17b0]
    • Fix freezes caused by concurrently produced iterators [8eae05b9][2d396ae7][6e66c2e5][24b0df8a]
    • Fix unimatch for non-base properties [0a1256af]
  • Internal:
    • Implement support for moar::hllincludes config variable [a96bfdc2][552f2810]
    • Fix binary release set-env.* scripts with space in path [a4a46e3c]
    • Rakudo::Iterator::UnendingValue no longer a PredictiveIterator [917d674b]
    • Separate Rakudo::Iterator::IntRange into two classes [03aef65c]
    • PredictiveIterator provides own push-until-lazy [7cf3927d]
    • Various internal fixes and improvements [5976e30e][bdc5092f][1bd0411c][f2959ad5][ddc7c9ff][9c69b7d5] [941349d0][eae82f09][2efe4302][7f5f60e8][22f78f4e][9bf1e1c2]

The following people contributed to this release:

Elizabeth Mattijsen, Vadim Belman, Will "Coke" Coleda, Oleksandr Kyriukhin, Stefan Seifert, Daniel Green, Patrick Böker, raydiak, Juan Julián Merelo Guervós, Michal Bozon, Michael Ruigrok, Ben Davies, Christian Bartolomäus, Daniel Sockwell, Patrick Spek, Stoned Elipot, Jimmy Zhuo, Mustafa Aydın, Nguyễn Gia Phong, Nicholas Clark, Nick Logan, jubilatious1

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 Libera.

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 (#149), is tentatively scheduled for 2021-08-21.

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/ ↩