Announce: Rakudo Star - 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 January 2013 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the January 2013 release is available from <http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/>. A Windows .MSI version of Rakudo star will usually appear in the downloads area shortly after the tarball release. 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 2013.01 [0] of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 4.10.0 of the Parrot Virtual Machine [2], and various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community. Some of the new features added to this release include: * Sink context (what some other languages call void context) is now enforced correctly. This means that for-loops are now lazy by default. It fixes the bug where a map in sink context would not execute, and also means that a Failure returned to sink context will be properly thrown. * 'require' now works with indirect module names * Restored socket read semantics to returning the requested number of bytes * $obj.Some::Role::meth() now passes the correct $obj * try/CATCH now returns Nil when the CATCH is triggered, rather than the exception; this brings it in line with try without a CATCH * whatever-star cases of splice now implemented * can now import multis with the same name from different modules, provided all dispatchers are onlystar This release also contains a range of bug fixes, improvements to error reporting and better failure modes. The following features have been deprecated or modified from previous releases due to changes in the Perl 6 specification, and are being removed or changed as follows: * postcircumfix:<[ ]> and postcircumfix:<{ }> will become multi-subs rather than multi-methods. Both at_pos and at_key will remain methods. * Unary hyper ops currently descend into nested arrays and hashes. This will change to make them equivalent to a one-level map. * The Str.ucfirst builtin is deprecated; it will be replaced by Str.tc. * Leading whitespace in rules and under :sigspace will no longer be converted to <.ws> . For existing regexes that expect this conversion, add a <?> in front of leading whitespace to make it meta again. * The ?-quantifier on captures in regexes currently binds the capture slot to a List containing either zero or one Match objects; i.e., it is equivalent to "** 0..1". In the future, the ?-quantifier will bind the slot directly to a captured Match or to Nil. Existing code can manage the transition by changing existing ?-quantifiers to use "** 0..1", which will continue to return a List of matches. 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 * Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints * interactive readline that understands Unicode * non-blocking I/O * much of Synopsis 9 There is an online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo 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. [0] https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2013.01 [1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo [2] http://parrot.org/
