Rakudo Perl 6 on Android ICS 4.0.3

The Asus Transformer Prime (TF201) is an outstanding Android tablet and with keyboard it is a very good netbook replacement. Using Linux Installer aided by some tweaks you can make it build and run current (June 2012) Parrot and Rakudo. On a Debian Stable (6.0 Squeeze) installation, you need only use apt-get to install the git-core, gcc and make packages (optionally libicu-dev) and do a standard /var/www/users/martin_berends/index.html

Niecza almost took part in the Perl 6 Coding Contest

The community at #perl6 on freenode derived much pleasure from studying and discussing the entries to Masak's Perl 6 Coding Contest 2010. Five problems, five contestants, 26 entries (go figure) all used Rakudo. Since Niecza is the new Perl 6 kid on the block, it seemed an interesting idea to try it out on the submissions.

Alas, it was very disappointing to see error after error from Niecza. The results ar…

Rakudo Perl 6 gets into databases

Database access for Rakudo Perl 6 has improved markedly in the past month. Here are the main points:

The MiniDBI project formerly known as FakeDBI is destined for inclusion in Rakudo * and is now 'usable' and 'useful'. Commit permission to the repo is freely available via hugme in #perl6. Porting simple database client software from Perl 5 to Perl 6 requires only minimal editing.

So, why MiniDBI and not just DBI? Because Perl 6 will have a DBI v2, based on JDBC, read more about that below. The P…

Measuring Rakudo performance

You can now create "statistics" about Rakudo performance (perhaps to augment your "lies" and "damn lies" ;-) using new funtionality added to the 'tools/test_summary.pl' script. It's under the title "Simple Relative Benchmarking", and needs at least two runs to give usable data. Please try it, and compare findings in #perl6.

With up to about 2% additional run time, test_summary gets Rakudo's Test.pm to emit per-test timestamps to microsecond resolution. Then test_summary calculates the (real) execution time of each of the more than 30000 spectests and inserts the results into 'docs/t…

Just what we all want - a decent blog site :-)

Is it really possible that this is the first outsider's entry on the shiny new blog site? That's exciting! This site ticks all the boxes, and that cannot be said for most of the alternatives. Well done to the Dave Cross and the developer team! At #perl6 on irc.freenode.net there are occasional discussions about writing a blogging engine in Perl 6. Search for "yarn" in http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/today and you will see how little has been done so far. When it does begin to grow, it will be a good idea to stea^W adopt some layout annd style ideas from this wonderful site :)

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