On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm happy to announce the August 2010 release of Rakudo Perl #32 "Pisa". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see <http://www.parrot.org>). The tarball for the August 2010 release is available from <http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads>.
Please note: This announcement is not for the Rakudo Star distribution -- it's announcing a new release of the compiler only. For the latest Rakudo Star release, see <http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads>. The Rakudo Perl compiler follows a monthly release cycle, with each release named after a Perl Mongers group. The August 2010 release is code named "Pisa" in recognition of its excellent work in organizing YAPC::EU 2010, "The Renaissance of Perl" [1,2]. Many Rakudo developers presented at the conference, and it was an excellent location for a hackathon and planning the next phases of Rakudo development. Some of the specific changes and improvements occurring with this release include: * Due to a specification change, Nil is now undefined, and no longer simply an empty Parcel. * Many modifiers are now recognized on the outside of regexes and substitutions, for example s:g:samecase/abc/defg/ * Improvements to the performance of integer operations * Initial implementations of .pack and .unpack methods for the Buf class * Smartmatching against True or False is now an error. Most people who did this really wanted to look at the return value of .so instead. For a more detailed list of changes see "docs/ChangeLog". The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Perl possible, as well as those people who worked on Parrot, the Perl 6 test suite and the specification. The following people contributed to this release: Moritz Lenz, Patrick R. Michaud, Solomon Foster, Will "Coke" Coleda, Carl Mäsak, Jonathan Worthington, Bruce Gray, Patrick Abi Salloum, tylercurtis, Kyle Hasselbacher, Tadeusz Sośnierz, Jonathan Scott Duff, Christopher J. Madsen, Kodi Arfer, Reini Urban, TimToady, felliott, Matt Kraai, Jan Ingvoldstad, szabgab, madsen, Andy Lester, cosimo, Fitz Elliott 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 (#33) is scheduled for September 23, 2010. A list of the other planned release dates and code names for 2010 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! [1] http://www.perl.it/ [2] http://conferences.yapceurope.org/ye2010/
