Author Archives: jjmerelo

Day 5: Malware and Raku

This article has been written by Paula de la Hoz, cybersecurity specialist and artist. While Raku regex and tokens are meant to work on data structures (such as parsing and validating file types), they can help us to better understand malware. Malware, as any other legit binary, have some signatures within. Some “file signatures” areContinue reading “Day 5: Malware and Raku”

Day 4: Give the gift of time

Lately, Santa was getting lots of letters that went a bit like this Dear Santa: I’ve been mostly good, with 98% coverage this year, so what I want for Christmas is… time. You know, I have great Rakulang GitHub Actions for stuff, but when I need to install some external package and also many distributions,Continue reading “Day 4: Give the gift of time”

Day 24 – Packaging and unpackaging real good

After all Rakuing along all Christmas, Santa realizes it’s a pretty good idea to keep things packed and ready to ship whenever it’s needed. So it looks at containers. Not the containers that might or might not actually be doing all the grunt work for bringing gifts to all good boys and girls in theContinue reading “Day 24 – Packaging and unpackaging real good”

Day 20 – Create beautiful text charts

Santa got his weekly gift-wrapping report from the Gift Wrapping department. It contained lots of numbers Every number corresponded to the gifts wrapped by every elf in the department in alphabetical order, starting with Alabaster Snowball, and continuing with Bushy Evergreen. But numbers don’t sing, and that made Santa not sing either. A simple wayContinue reading “Day 20 – Create beautiful text charts”

It’s that time of the year… again

And we’re still around and kicking new advent posts with the best, the nicest and the merely possible in the Raku realm. Also the 13th year in a row for this calendar, and also 6th year since what was then called Perl 6 was released. Raku is now faster, it’s already in production in aContinue reading “It’s that time of the year… again”

Day 24: Christmas-oriented programming, part deux

In the previous installment of this series of articles, we started with a straightforward script, and we wanted to arrive to a sound object-oriented design using Raku. Our (re)starting point was this user story:

Day 23: Christmas-oriented design and implementation

Every year by the beginning of the school year, which starts by January 8th in the North Pole, after every version of the Christmas gift-giving spirit has made their rounds, Santa needs to sit down to schedule the classes of the North Pole Community College. These elves need continuous education, and they need to reallyContinue reading “Day 23: Christmas-oriented design and implementation”

Day 16: Writing faster Raku code, Part II

By Wim Vanderbauwhede This is the follow-on article about writing an expression parser in Raku. In the previous article, I explained the background looked at some basic performance comparisons relating to data structures for parsing and ways to process them: lists, parse trees, recursive descent and iteration. In this article, we’ll have a look atContinue reading “Day 16: Writing faster Raku code, Part II”

Day 14: Writing Faster Raku code, Part I

By Wim Vanderbauwhede Last year, in Perl land, I discussed the result of my attempts to optimize the performance of an expression parser which is part of my Perl-based Fortran source-to-source compiler. An expression parser takes strings representing expressions in a programming language (in my case Fortran) and turns it into a data structure calledContinue reading “Day 14: Writing Faster Raku code, Part I”