2009/6/19 Patrick R. Michaud <pmich...@pobox.com>: > > On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce > the June 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #18 "Pittsburgh". > Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1]. > The tarball for the June 2009 release is available from > http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads . >
As usual, binaries for Windows are available on http://parrotwin32.sourceforge.net/ , including the latest Parrot release and many other languages. > Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the > frequent addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we continue > to recommend that people wanting to use or work with Rakudo obtain > the latest source directly from the main repository at github. > More details are available at http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo . > > Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release code named > after a Perl Mongers group. This release is named "Pittsburgh", which > is the host for YAPC|10 (YAPC::NA 2009) [2] and the Parrot Virtual Machine > Workshop [3]. Pittsburgh.pm has also sponsored hackathons for Rakudo > Perl as part of the 2008 Pittsburgh Perl Workshop [4]. > > In this release of Rakudo Perl, we've focused our efforts on refactoring > many of Rakudo's internals; these refactors improve performance, > bring us closer to the Perl 6 specification, operate more cleanly > with Parrot, and provide a stronger foundation for features to be > implemented in the near future. Some of the specific major changes > and improvements in this release include: > > * Rakudo is now passing 11,536 spectests, an increase of 194 > passing tests since the May 2009 release. With this release > Rakudo is now passing 68% of the available spectest suite. > > * Method dispatch has been substantially refactored; the new dispatcher > is significantly faster and follows the Perl 6 specification more > closely. > > * Object initialization via the BUILD and CREATE (sub)methods is > substantially improved. > > * All return values are now type checked (previously only explicit > 'return' statements would perform type checking). > > * String handling is significantly improved: fewer Unicode-related > bugs exist, and parsing speed is greatly improved for some programs > containing characters in the Latin-1 set. > > * The IO .lines and .get methods now follow the specification more closely. > > * User-defined operators now also receive some of their associated > meta variants. > > * The 'is export' trait has been improved; more builtin functions > and methods can be written in Perl 6 instead of PIR. > > * Many Parrot changes have improved performance and reduced overall > memory leaks (although there's still much more improvement needed). > > 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 (#19) is scheduled for July 23, 2009. > A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2009 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! > > References: > [1] Parrot, http://parrot.org/ > [2] YAPC|10 http://yapc10.org/yn2009/ > [3] Parrot Virtual Machine Workshop, http://yapc10.org/yn2009/talk/2045 > [4] Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, http://pghpw.org/ppw2008/ > >