Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 development release #27 ("Copenhagen") On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the March 2010 development release of Rakudo Perl #27 "Copenhagen". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see http://www.parrot.org). The tarball for the March 2010 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .
Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release named after a Perl Mongers group. The March 2010 release is code named "Copenhagen" for Copenhagen.pm, hosts of the Perl 6 Copenhagen Hackathon [1], which took place in connection with the Open Source Days Conference. The main goal of the hackathon was to raise some awareness around Perl 6, and to give everyone a chance to get their hands-on with Perl 6. The Copenhagen hackathon helped nail down a number of issues regarding module loading. During these days we also saw a heightened activity on the channel, in the Perl 6 and Rakudo repositories, and in the number of passing tests. All this was contributed by people both on location and elsewhere. The RT queue peaked at 725 new/open tickets, and then started on a downward trend. Apart from the great steps forward in productivity, it was the first time some of the core Perl 6 contributors had a chance to meet. Some of the specific changes and improvements occuring with this release include: * Numerous updates to trigonometric functions and the Rat class * Basic s/// and s[...] = '...' implemented * use improved and need/import implemented, with some basic support for versioned modules and lexical importation * Grammars work again and now include support for regexes taking parameters and proto-regexes * Series operator now has basic support for the current Spec. * User defined operators working again * Support, though with caveats, for !, R, X and Z meta-operators * Performance improvements for invocation and hash creation * Various parsing bugs fixed * Variables initialized to Any by default now, not Mu * ROADMAP updates 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. 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 (#28) is scheduled for April 22, 2010. A list of the other planned release dates and codenames 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://conferences.yapceurope.org/hack2010dk/