27 Jul 2026
timo the initial rework of the gdb plugin made it in, and so did the change to rakudo-gdb-m that points it out and tells you that you may have to do an extra action to get it to actually show up 08:38
the PR is a bit light on "look at the shiny", but it's probably the best thing to point people at that I have? it does have an overview of the new stuff 08:42
lizmat github.com/MoarVM/MoarVM/pull/2025 right ? 08:46
timo yes, let me link a gist or two with some example output 08:47
lizmat thanks, please :-)
timo OK, the description text of the PR now links to two gists with example output 08:50
lizmat thanks! 09:15
And another Rakudo Weekl;y hits the Net: rakudoweekly.blog/2026/07/27/2026-...thank-you/ 12:55
28 Jul 2026
Geth MoarVM: neilpang++ created pull request #2027:
Add VM-based CI that builds and tests on DragonFly BSD
10:53
[Coke] Got a binary release error with moarvm in #raku-dev, please take a look 12:36
ah, looks there was followup in #raku 12:37
Geth MoarVM/main: b2d8fa257a | Coke++ | docs/release_guide.md
markdown, not pod
12:59
[Coke] do we need to be doing step #3 in the release guide? 13:08
3. If possible, run **NQP** and **Rakudo** `make test` and **Rakudo** `make spectest` when `#define MVM_DEBUG_NFG 1` and `#define MVM_DEBUG_NFG_STRICT 1` in `src/strings/ops.h` after recompiling to make sure there have been no normalization bugs introduced.
If we need to be testing those variants, let's put them in the CI. 13:15
timo it's a performance hit, but probably not a big one? 13:44
30 Jul 2026
[Coke] anything post release needs merging? 14:10
1 Aug 2026
MasterDuke timo: i have a very rough branch that uses simdutf in MVM_string_utf8_decode. however, it isn't really any faster (or smaller) because there are a lot of cases where it can't be used and it just falls back to the existing code 22:18
tellable6 2026-07-18T21:39:25Z #raku-dev <ugexe> MasterDuke: Thanks, I have a branch adding some dead code elimination now but it’s behind like 4 other branches I have yet to review and push
timo what cases are those?
MasterDuke any where `MVM_string_convert_utf8_to_latin1` errors out
so i think any codepoints/graphemes/whatever > 127 22:19
timo that sounds like it would be anything where utf8 has more than one byte for a codepoint? 22:20
MasterDuke github.com/MasterDuke17/MoarVM/tre...th_simdutf has the code, but it's not really usable as is
i'm not sure if this is worth trying to finish up/make viable as a real PR 22:21
i could try to replicate what i have for `MVM_string_utf8_decodestream`, which would get it used in a couple more situations 22:22
but if it isn't faster, there's no real point
so i'm wondering if you have any ideas that could make this worthwhile 22:23
i.e., i'm not sure how our \r\n handling may interact 22:30
s/i\.e\./e.g./
or if there are any different libraries that'd be useful? or is our NFG unique enough that if we want to get faster we have to do it (mostly) ourselves (write our own simd directly)? 22:33
timo yeah, I'm really not sure if any library would happen to do the strange things we do
presumably none of the "utf8 parsing" libraries do any normalization 22:34
and we do more normalization than anyone else
MasterDuke i haven't looked at what swift uses, since i think they're the next closest
i just saw github.com/dzfrias/xxUTF, but haven't actually looked at what it offers yet 22:35
timo they put the "move from one grapheme to the next" logic where-ever an utf8 string is moved through 22:39
MasterDuke it seems like swift implements whatever they do themselves in swift 22:42
timo xxutf might be interesting. difficult to say 22:49
MasterDuke would it make any sense to use xxUTF to do NF[^G] normalization and then (hopefully very quickly) post-process its results? 22:50
is it possible to quickly find where in a string/buffer NFG would differ from NF[^G]? maybe make more strands than we do now by using those libraries for parts of the input, and then doing our NFG stuff for the remaining parts? 22:53
or how difficult would it be to add NFG to xxUTF? 22:54
dinner & 22:59
timo even after you use xxUTF to normalize a string into NFC, that's going to be an utf8 string afterwards too right? 23:00
utf8 has no way to represent NFG codepoints 23:01
2 Aug 2026
Geth MoarVM/main: 2e11df6f3d | (Daniel Green)++ | .gitmodules
Ignore zmij's untracked files (its .o)
11:56
MoarVM: MasterDuke17++ created pull request #2029:
Bump mimalloc to v2.4.4
11:58