Slides from my talk at London Perl Workshop 2018 covering a number of Perl6 modules

1. 24 Uses for Perl6
Adventures in Module Land

2. Who?
● Simon Proctor
● Senior Developer at Zoopla
● Known as Scimon in most places
● Likes to talk about Perl6 people keep letting me

3. Why?
There are over 1200 modules in the Perl6 ecosystem as of
November 2018*
I thought it would be nice to highlight some.
* There are some duplicates due to modules existing in both Git and CPAN

4. Disclaimer(s)
● This is not a list of “best” modules merely ones I thought interesting
● Modules are listed alphabetically not ranked (with one exception).
● I picked 24 so I have 2 minutes to talk about each.
● Modules with documentation generally got preference.
● I wrote at least 1 of these.

5. NativeCall : From the Docs
“Call into dynamic libraries that follow the C calling convention”

6. NativeCall
● In core but has to be specifically imported
● Set of interfaces to work with dynamic libraries
● Allows for using existing compiled libraries easily in Perl6 code
● https://docs.perl6.org/language/nativecall.html

7. App::GPTrixie : From the Docs
“A tool to generate NativeCall code from C headers”

8. App::GPTrixie
● Give it a C headers file and a selection of options and it will create a basic Native
Call wrapper
● The final result will probably need a bit of work to get working but is a good base
point
● Allows for faster creation of higher level interfaces to shared libraries
● C++ support on the way.

9. App::Mi6 : From the Docs
“App::Mi6 - minimal authoring tool for Perl6”

10. App::Mi6
● Module development tool covers :
○ New Module creation
○ Testing
○ Documentation creation
○ Deployment to CPAN
● Highly recommended if you’re doing any module development even just
internally

11. Bailador : From the Docs
“Bailador is a light-weight route-based web application
framework for Perl 6”

12. Bailador
● A web application framework similar in usage to Dancer or Mojolicious
● Templating using Template::Mojo or Template::Mustache
● Features include :
○ Routing
○ Logging
○ Sitemap creation
○ Sessions
○ Configuration

13. BioPerl6 : From the Docs
“Collection of Bioinformatics classes, roles, and modules”

14. BioPerl6
● Attempting to redo the BioPerl code in Perl6
● Currently has the following models implemented :
○ Bio::PrimarySeq
○ Bio::Range
○ Bio::Root
● Looking for people to help
● See also BioInfo

15. Cairo : From the Docs
“Cairo 2D Graphics library binding for Perl 6”

16. Cairo
● Nice to use wrapper around the Cairo image library
● Creates files in a number of formats including
○ PNG
○ SVG
○ PDF

17. Color : From the Docs
“Format conversion, manipulation, and math operations on
colors”

18. Color
● Color object with operators to manipulate colours
● Handles different colour formats rgb, rgba, cmyk, hsl, hsv
● Manipulation options includes :
○ darken / lighten
○ desaturate / saturate
○ invert
○ rotate (around HSL colour wheel)
● Include custom operators for Color object manipulation

19. Config : From the Docs
“A perl 6 library for reading and writing configuration files”

20. Config
● Extensible Config file reader and writer
● Available parsers include:
○ JSON
○ TOML
○ YAML

21. Cro : From the Docs
“Cro is a set of libraries for building reactive distributed systems,
lovingly crafted to take advantage of all Perl 6 has to offer.”

22. Cro
● Uses Perl6 supplies to manage network requests and responses
● Fully threaded, no need for process management
● Handles out of the box :
○ HTTP/1.1
○ HTTP/2
○ HTTPS
○ Websockets
○ ZeroMQ
○ OpenApi 3
○ Various Authentication schemes including JWT
● For more information check out https://cro.services/docs

23. Data::Dump : From the Docs
“that's right folks, here's a quicky for your data dump needs. if
you have Terminal::ANSIColor installed then the output will be
so colorful your eyes might bleed.”

24. Data::Dump
● For when just say $_.perl isn’t enough
● Configurable options for :
○ Indentation
○ Colorisation
○ Recursion
○ Skipping Methods in Object
● Will give a dump of the input.
● Objects will dump the methods with signatures as well as attributes.

25. DDT : From the Docs
“Distribution Development Tool”

26. DDT
● Tool for creating modules
● Includes build, test and release stages
● Includes auto-generators for:
○ Classes
○ Roles
○ Package
○ Grammars
○ Modules
○ Tests
● Includes a watch option which can execute a given command

27. Desktop::Notify : From the Docs
“a set of simple bindings to libnotify using NativeCall”

28. Desktop::Notify
● Integrates with the Desktop Notification spec
● Simple interface to allow creating notifications

29. Jupyter::Kernel : From the Docs
“This is a pure-Perl 6 implementation of a Perl 6 kernel for
Jupyter notebooks.”

30. Jupyter::Kernel
● A Pure Perl6 implementation of a Jupyter binder
● Allows running Perl6 in a browser and Jupyter binder
● See also Net::Jupyter and iperl6kernel

31. Math::Constants : From the Docs
A few constants defined in Perl6

32. Math::Constants
● A selection of mathematical and physics constants including :
○ Gravitational constant as G
○ Speed of light as c, can also be used as a suffix (eg 3c)
○ Golden Ratio as either phi or φ
● And many more

33. Math::Matrix : From the Docs
“Create, compare, compute and measure 2D matrices”

34. Math::Matrix
● Matrix Mathematics system including:
○ transpose
○ invert
○ negate
○ add
○ multiply
○ dot product
○ tensor product
○ 22 ops
○ 16 boolean properties
○ And more
● In active development

35. Object::Delayed : From the Docs
“Export subs for lazy object creation”

36. Object::Delayed
● Adds two new keywords
● slack
○ Blocks defined with slack are evaluated when required.
○ Useful for lazy attribute / variable creation
● catchup
○ Blocks defined with catchup are evaluated asynchronously
○ If the block hasn’t finished evaluating when it’s required the code will block until it’s ready

37. OO::Monitors : From the Docs
“A monitor provides per-instance mutual exclusion for objects”

38. OO::Monitors
● Adds a new class keyword monitor
● A monitor has locking in place the ensures for a given instance only 1 thread can
be in it’s method at a time
● Simplifies thread safe coding practices

39. P5built-ins : From the Docs
“Implement Perl 5's built-in functions”

40. P5built-ins : From the Docs
● Meta module to import Perl6 implementations of Perl5 builtin functions like :
○ abs
○ fc
○ getgrpgid
○ log
○ -e
○ -z
○ __FILE__
○ __LINE__
● And many many more 89 functions, 9 file tests and 10 specific terms
● Very handy if you are porting Perl5 code to Perl6

41. Red : From the Docs
“Red - A WiP ORM for raku”

42. Red
● Perl6 ORM that leverages the Perl6 OO system
● Use traits to define relationships between objects and tables
● Currently Work In Progress looking for contributors
● https://github.com/FCO/Red : More info here

43. Sparrowdo : From the Docs
“Configuration management tool based on sparrow plugins
system.”

44. Sparrowdo
● DSL based system configuration tool for managing servers
● 28 Plugins currently available in the Perl6 Modules list
● Also includes Sparky a CI system

45. Stats : From the Docs
“Perl6 statistics modules. Currently has some basic statistics
functions revolving around averages.”

46. Stats
● Set of functions for doing stats on lists of numbers
○ mean
○ median
○ mode
○ quartiles
○ standard deviation
○ combined summary

47. SVG::Plot : From the Docs
“a simple 2D chart plotter for Perl 6.”

48. SVG::Plot
● Create SVG graphs including :
○ bars
○ stacked bars
○ lines
○ points
○ bubbles
○ pie charts
● Currently looking for documentation

49. Terminal::Print : From the Docs
“Terminal::Print intends to provide the essential underpinnings
of command-line printing, to be the fuel for the fire, so to speak,
for libraries which might aim towards 'command-line user
interfaces' (CUI), asynchronous monitoring, rogue-like
adventures, screensavers, video art, etc.”

50. Terminal::Print
● Library for printing to a terminal
● Geared towards fast updating terminal apps
● Looks really good for terminal based games
● Includes a selection of examples demonstrating its capabilities.

51. Trait::Env : From the Docs
“Trait to set an attribute from an environment variable.”

52. Trait::Env
● Allows for simple parsing of Environment variables into Object Attributes or
Variables
● Handles:
○ Booleans
○ Ints
○ Strings
○ Defaults
○ Arrays (JSON or separated strings)
○ Hashes (JSON or separated string)
● Simple mapping between variable name and Environment variable name

53. Uzu : From the Docs
“static site generator with built-in web server, file modification
watcher, live reload, i18n, themes, and multi-page support”

54. Uzu
● Static site builder with local web server for development
● Multiple templating options
○ Template6 (based on Template::Toolkit)
○ Mustache
○ Markdown (planned not)
● Internationalization built in
● Under development

55. Thoughts
● There’s a lot of modules available for Perl6
● But there’s lots of areas that are ripe for people to write modules for
● A lot of the modules could do with some more people involved
● And some of them could do with a bit more documentation
● NativeCall makes using system libraries really really easy