-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 ## A useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6
On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to announce the March 2015 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the March 2015 release is available from <http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/>. This Rakudo Star release comes with support for the MoarVM backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms) along with experimental support for the JVM backend (the modules `Bailador`, `Digest::MD5` and `Grammar::Profiler::Simple` are known to fail tests). In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language ("Perl 6") and specific implementations of the language such as "Rakudo Perl". This Star release includes [release 2015.03] of the [Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 2015.03 of [MoarVM], plus various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community. [release 2015.03]: https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2015.03.md [Rakudo Perl 6 compiler]: http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo [MoarVM]: http://moarvm.org/ Some of the new compiler features added to this release include: + several renames of semi-internal methods. Please refer to [the Rakudo 2015.02 release notes](https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2015.03.md) for the full list + Allow `Buf.AT-POS` to return an l-value. + Implement `method ^foo($) { ... }` syntax. + Implemented [PairMap](http://doc.perl6.org/type/PairMap) (the simple case only, for now). + Implemented `.antipairs` (pairs with value => key). + Implemented [pairup](http://doc.perl6.org/type/Any#method_pairup) for creating pairs from lists. + Implemented `LEXICAL`, `OUTERS` and `CALLERS` pseudo-packages + Add `array[T]`, usable for native `int`/`num` (MoarVM only for now) + Other native improvements, e.g. `my int $a; $a++` + Implement `IO::Path.resolve` on r-m/POSIX In future, the `nqp::` namespace willl only be available after a declaration like `use nqp;`. Changes to modules included in Rakudo Star: - - [DBIish](https://github.com/perl6/DBIish) supports local Sockets on mysql, and now correctly handles returned NULL values in the Pg backend - - [doc](https://github.com/perl6/doc) ships with much more documentation There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases. Some of the not-quite-there features include: * advanced macros * threads and concurrency (in progress) * Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints * interactive readline that understands Unicode * non-blocking I/O (in progress) * much of Synopsis 9 and 11 There is an online resource at <http://perl6.org/compilers/features> that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo's backends and other Perl 6 implementations. In many places we've tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the programmer that a given feature isn't implemented, but there are many that we've missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are welcomed at <rakudo...@perl.org>. See <http://perl6.org/> for links to much more information about Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A draft of a Perl 6 book is available as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf in the release tarball. The development team thanks all of the contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Star possible. If you would like to contribute, see <http://rakudo.org/how-to-help>, ask on the <perl6-compi...@perl.org> mailing list, or join us on IRC \#perl6 on freenode. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 iEYEARECAAYFAlUN3iYACgkQT81LMIj/VkTYSACfeumxLQzxeRPfNHIYge6ZHEwU L9sAn0rfiVwi5CB0RSFJ125UKvv5P7OG =+CBE -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
