On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 22:04, Patrick R. Michaud <pmich...@pobox.com> wrote: > On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce > the February 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #14 "Vienna". > Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1]. > The tarball for the February 2009 release is available from > > http://www.pmichaud.com/perl6/rakudo-2009-02.tar.gz > > However, because of the rapid pace of Rakudo development and addition > of new features, we still recommend that people wanting to use or work > with Rakudo obtain the latest version directly from the main repository > at github -- more on this in a bit. > > This is the fourteenth development release of Rakudo Perl, but it's > the first release independent from Parrot releases. We will continue > to follow a monthly release cycle, with each release to be code named > after a Perl Mongers group. This release is named for Vienna.pm > (http://vienna.pm.org), who have been sponsoring Jonathan Worthington's > work on Rakudo since April 2008. A list of the other planned release > dates and codenames for 2009 is available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" > file. In general, Rakudo development releases are scheduled to occur > two days after each Parrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third > Tuesday of each month. > > Rakudo Perl now uses git [2] for its version control system, hosted > at http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo . The README file there is kept > up-to-date with the latest instructions for obtaining and building > Rakudo Perl. > > In this release of Rakudo Perl, we've made the following major changes > and improvements: > > * Rakudo is now passing 7076 spectests. This is an increase of 796 > passing tests since the January 2009 release. > > * The Configure.pl script supports a "--gen-parrot" option to > automatically fetch and build the appropriate version of Parrot. > > * The default make target now builds a binary executable directly, either > perl6 or perl6.exe. It's still a Parrot "fakecutable", but we think > we've made it more reliable so that it doesn't generate segmentation > faults on exits. (If you don't know what a "fakecutable" is you can > safely ignore this.) > > * Many builtins are beginning to be written in pure Perl 6, or Perl 6 > functions with inline PIR. These builtins are part of the core > "setting" for Perl 6, and appear in the src/setting/ directory. > Previously this was known as the "prelude". > > * Improved Test.pm diagnostic output. > > Also, Rakudo now implements the following Perl 6 features: > > * Anonymous classes may be specified using :: > * Existing parameterized roles are now reused instead of creating new ones. > * Roles pun a class when .new is invoked on them. > * "proto" now marks all same-named routines as "multi". > * "XopX" is now "Xop". > * <-> (rw) pointy blocks. > * min= and max= metaoperators. > * Many many bugfixes and documentation improvements. > > The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for > making Rakudo Perl possible. The next release of Rakudo (#15) is > scheduled for March 19, 2009. > > > References: > [1] Parrot, http://parrot.org/ > [2] Git version control system, http://git-scm.org/ > congratulations, patrick. this is a *giant* step for rakudo, and by extension for parrot. the first independent release of a parrot-based perl 6 has now landed--and it's already passing 40% of the official spec test suite. rakudo has a strong and growing community of developers, testers, and contributors, and this is due in no small part to a lead developer who never seems to run out of enthusiasm, isn't afraid to take a step back and refactor to get things right, and leads by stellar example. i expect your attitude and enthusiasm will continue to foster this burdgeoning community into a true representation of perl 6 culture, and will carry forward to ensure the continued success of rakudo and perl 6. i hope you will take a little time and reflect on what you've accomplished, before you get back into the thick of things.
speaking as both a developer and a sponsor of rakudo, i'd like to thank you for your invaluable contributions, without which we'd be, in a word, lost. ~jerry
