2009/9/17 jerry gay <jerry....@gmail.com>: > On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce > the September 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #21 "Seattle". > Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1]. > The tarball for the September 2009 release is available from > http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads . >
As usual, binaries for Windows are available on http://sourceforge.net/projects/parrotwin32/files/ , including the latest Parrot release and many other languages. > Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the frequent > addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we recommend building Rakudo > from the latest source, available from the main repository at github. > More details are available at http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo. > > Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release code named > after a Perl Mongers group. September 2009 is code named "Seattle" for the > enthusiasm they have shown for Perl 6 during monthly meetings, and the > feedback, encouragement and support given me for the past several years. > > Since the 2009-08 release, Rakudo Perl builds from an "installed > Parrot" instead of using Parrot's build tree. This release of Rakudo > requires Parrot 1.6.0. For the latest information on building and > using Rakudo Perl, see the README file section titled "Building and > invoking Rakudo". (Quick note: the "--gen-parrot" option still > automatically downloads and builds Parrot as before, if you prefer > that approach.) > > Also, unlike previous versions of Rakudo Perl, the "perl6" > (or "perl6.exe") executables only work when invoked from the > Rakudo root directory until a "make install" is performed. > Running "make install" will install Rakudo and its libraries > into the Parrot installation that was used to build it, and then > the executables will work when invoked from any directory. > > Some of the specific major changes and improvements occuring > with this release include: > > * Rakudo is now passing 15,497 spectests, an increase of 3,128 > passing tests since the August 2009 release. With this release > Rakudo is now passing 71.5% of the available spectest suite. > > * Rakudo now supports contextual variables. > > * Rakudo now supports the rational (Rat) data type. > > * Rakudo now supports overloading of many of the builtin operators, > many of which are now defined in the core setting. Many have > also been improved to be more faithful to the specification > with respect to types and coercions. > > * Substantially improved support for trait handling. Most of the > "built-in" traits are now defined in the core setting. > > * The %*ENV variable now works properly for modifying the process environment. > > Since the Perl 6 specification is still in flux, some deprecated features > have been removed from Rakudo. Prominently among those are: > > * '=$handle' is deprecated in favor of '$handle.get' (one line) > and '$handle.lines' (all lines). > > * 'int $obj' is deprecated in favor of '$obj.Int'. > > The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for > making Rakudo Perl possible. If you would like to contribute, > see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help , ask on the perl6-compi...@perl.org > mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode. > > The next release of Rakudo (#22) is scheduled for October 22, 2009. > 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. > > Have fun! > > References: > [1] Parrot, http://parrot.org/ > >
