Good stuff, let's celebrate! On Thu, 2010-07-29 at 07:23 -0500, Patrick R. Michaud wrote: > On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to > announce the July 2010 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable > distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the July 2010 release is > available from <http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads>. > > Rakudo Star is aimed at "early adopters" of Perl 6. We know that > it still has some bugs, it is far slower than it ought to be, and > there are some advanced pieces of the Perl 6 language specification > that aren't implemented yet. But Rakudo Perl 6 in its current form > is also proving to be viable (and fun) for developing applications > and exploring a great new language. These "Star" releases are > intended to make Perl 6 more widely available to programmers, grow > the Perl 6 codebase, and gain additional end-user feedback about the > Perl 6 language and Rakudo's implementation of it. > > In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language > ("Perl 6") and specific implementations of the language such as > "Rakudo Perl". "Rakudo Star" is a distribution that includes > release #31 of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 2.6.0 of > the Parrot Virtual Machine [2], and various modules, documentation, > and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community. We > plan to make Rakudo Star releases on a monthly schedule, with > occasional special releases in response to important bugfixes or > changes. > > Some of the many cool Perl 6 features that are available in this > release of Rakudo Star: > * Perl 6 grammars and regexes > * formal parameter lists and signatures > * metaoperators > * gradual typing > * a powerful object model, including roles and classes > * lazy list evaluation > * multiple dispatch > * smart matching > * junctions and autothreading > * operator overloading (limited forms for now) > * introspection > * currying > * a rich library of builtin operators, functions, and types > * an interactive read-evaluation-print loop > * Unicode at the codepoint level > * resumable exceptions > > There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not > yet handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming > releases. Thus, we do not consider Rakudo Star to be a > "Perl 6.0.0" or "1.0" release. Some of the not-quite-there > features include: > * nested package definitions > * binary objects, native types, pack and unpack > * typed arrays > * macros > * state variables > * threads and concurrency > * Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints > * pre and post constraints, and some other phasers > * interactive readline that understands Unicode > * backslash escapes in regex <[...]> character classes > * non-blocking I/O > * most of Synopsis 9 > * perl6doc or pod manipulation tools > > 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. > > 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. > > Rakudo Star also bundles a number of modules; a partial list of > the modules provided by this release include: > * Blizkost > - enables some Perl 5 modules to be used from within Rakudo Perl 6 > * MiniDBI > - a simple database interface for Rakudo Perl 6 > * Zavolaj > - call C library functions from Rakudo Perl 6 > * SVG and SVG::Plot > - create scalable vector graphics > * HTTP::Daemon > - a simple HTTP server > * XML::Writer > - generate XML > * YAML > - dump Perl 6 objects as YAML > * Term::ANSIColor > - color screen output using ANSI escape sequences > * Test::Mock > - create mock objects and check what methods were called > * Math::Model > - describe and run mathematical models > * Config::INI > - parse and write configuration files > * File::Find > - find files in a given directory > * LWP::Simple > - fetch resources from the web > > These are not considered "core Perl 6 modules", and as module > development for Perl 6 continues to mature, future releases > of Rakudo Star will likely come bundled with a different set > of modules. Deprecation policies for bundled modules will be > created over time, and other Perl 6 distributions may choose > different sets of modules or policies. More information about > Perl 6 modules can be found at http://modules.perl6.org/. > > Rakudo Star also contains a draft of a Perl 6 book -- see > <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. > > Rakudo Star releases are created on a monthly cycle or as needed > in response to important bug fixes or improvements. The next planned > release of Rakudo Star will be on August 24, 2010. > > [1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo > [2] http://parrot.org/
-- Kiffin Gish <kiffin.g...@planet.nl> Gouda, The Netherlands
