Top all-time · #3331
6guts
Personal blog · 6guts.wordpress.comprogrammingsystems
6guts is a personal blog at 6guts.wordpress.com about programming and systems. Since 2010, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 43 times, most often “Of sisters, stacks, and CPAN”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link 6guts for Perl 6 and Raku internals: MoarVM async IO work, grapheme-based Unicode support (NFG), and development posts such as a TDD-built async socket client.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Tales of Raku guts hacking
Most-linked posts?
- Of sisters, stacks, and CPAN2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-01-26
- NQP (compiler toolkit) and Rakudo (Perl 6 in NQP) being ported to JVM2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-05-15
- Perl 6 is biased towards mutators being really simple. That’s a good thing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-25
What Hacker News says?
Perl6 (with the MoarVM backend at least) should have proper async IO on both network and file IO. jnthn (one of the primary contributors to MoarVM) has a write up about recent work done to improve the system here: https://6guts.wordpress.com/2017/06/08/sorting-out-synchrono...
Comment linking /2017/06/08/sorting-out-synchronous-io/
on “Why I’m Learning Perl 6”Submitted MoarVM: A virtual machine for NQP and Rakudo as a story · 40 points
HN discussionUnicode support of Raku is grapheme based (NFG or Normalization Form Grapheme). The unicode theory: https://unicode.org/reports/tr29/#Grapheme_Cluster_Boundarie... , about the implementation: https://6guts.wordpress.com/2015/04/12/this-week-unicode-nor...
Comment linking /2015/04/12/this-week-unicode-normalization-many-rts/
on “The Bash Hackers Wiki”Submitted Rakudo Perl 6 Architect Reflects on Last 8 Years as a story · 23 points
HN discussion> You seem to believe in the existence of a bunch of people who have somehow wrapped their identity around hating Perl 6. You only have to go to PerlMonks to find them. It's not that hard. > the Perl 6 community burned through their goodwill literally years ago That may be so, but most Perl 6 people from that era, either have left or have reverted to lurking mode. The current Perl 6 community mostly consist of peopl…
Comment linking /
on “Perl 11”Submitted Rakudo Star 2012.02 out – and the focus for 2012.03 (Perl6) as a story · 19 points
HN discussionIt turns out that the same NFG mechanism developed to support graphemes works for this non-grapheme scenario too: "... POSIX doesn’t promise you’ll get UTF-8, or even ASCII. It promises ... a bunch of bytes. We can now cope with this properly – surprisingly enough, thanks to the power of NFG. We now have a special encoding, UTF-8 Clean-8-bit, which turns bytes that are invalid as UTF-8 into synthetics, from which we…
Comment linking /2015/11/21/what-one-christmas-elf-has-been-up-to/
on “Perl 6 Introduction”Submitted Perl 6 is biased towards mutators being really simple. That’s a good thing as a story · 7 points
HN discussion> Any benefit you get from using UTF-16 vanishes the moment you need to operate on it like a string, in other words. So, don't decode to a string, and do all your character manipulation on the bytes. > A better solution is to allow programmers to specify string encoding and default it to UTF-8. Absolutely not: the internal representation of a string should be of no interest to a user of your language. The 'best' sol…
Comment linking /2015/12/05/getting-closer-to-christmas/
on “How Python does Unicode”Submitted Porting Perl 6 to the JVM as a story · 7 points
HN discussionCheck out https://docs.raku.org/language/unicode_ascii for an overview how Raku supports Unicode. And an article about its implementation from 2015: https://6guts.wordpress.com/2015/04/12/this-week-unicode-nor...
Comment linking /2015/04/12/this-week-unicode-normalization-many-rts/
on “Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)”Submitted Eliminating unrequired guards – MoarVM / Perl 6 as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI could give a list of features as to how Perl 6 will make my life as a developer better, but a list of features is not enough to justify adopting a whole new language with a small ecosystem. To adopt a language, it really has to improve your productivity. For instance, I think we've seen this with Go's adoption by people from dynamic languages, as it offered type safety, speed, and concurrency in a package that was…
Comment linking /2016/01/04/not-guts-but-6-part-1/
on “Why Would Anyone Use Perl 6?”Submitted Towards a new general dispatch mechanism in MoarVM as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSince H. Merijn Brandt started working on the Perl 6 version of Text::CSV, he has kept a log of how long a specific test (referred to as test-t) too to run. https://tux.nl/Talks/CSV6/speed.log Since then, Rakudo Perl 6 has become more than 100x as fast, at least for this test. And more than 250x as fast using a concurrent version of the test (which was as simple as putting a `.race` in the code). This makes it still…
Comment linking /
on “Brief History of JIT in MoarVM for Perl 6”Submitted Speeding up object creation (Perl6) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAt this point in time, I wouldn't recommend parsing files with a regex just yet. Parsing is indeed one of the few areas in Perl 6 that hasn't seen any specific optimizations yet. Where Perl 6 has seen a lot of work, is general performance, and specifically in the part of concurrency. Where the common idiom for grepping lines using a lazy iterator and showing the matching lines from a file in Perl 6 is: .say for $fil…
Comment linking /2017/03/16/considering-hyperrace-semantics/
on “Confessions of a recovering Perl Hacker”Submitted Faster box/unbox and Int operations – MoarVM / Perl 6 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis is part of a sequence using TDD to refactor and extend a Stomp client. The earlier posts (not doing much with async code) are https://6guts.wordpress.com/2016/01/04/not-guts-but-6-part-1... and https://6guts.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/not-guts-but-6-part-2... . There will be more.
Comment linking /2016/01/05/not-guts-but-6-part-2/
on “Perl 6: Building and testing async socket code”Submitted Perl 6: Optimizing Reading Lines from a File as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Perl 6 is biased towards mutators being really simple. That’s a good thing as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Perl 6: Building and testing async socket code as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted NQP (compiler toolkit) and Rakudo (Perl 6 in NQP) being ported to JVM as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Rakudo Debugger as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Raku's New Dispatch Mechanism Has Landed as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Multiple dispatch with the new MoarVM dispatcher – Jonathan Worthington as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Better usage information in the MoarVM specializer as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Concurrency in Perl 6 – Racing to writeness to wrongness leads as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted An optimizer lands, bringing native operators (for Rakudo Perl6) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A hint of meta-programming (rakudo perl6) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
