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Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 development release #25 ("Minneapolis") | ||
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On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the | ||
January 2010 development release of Rakudo Perl #25 "Minneapolis". | ||
Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine | ||
(see http://www.parrot.org). The tarball for the January 2010 release | ||
is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads . | ||
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Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release | ||
code named after a Perl Mongers group. The January 2010 release | ||
is code named "Minneapolis" for Minneapolis.pm, hosts of the annual | ||
Frozen Perl Workshop [1] (February 6, 2010). In 2009 the Frozen Perl | ||
Workshop featured a one-day hackathon for Perl 6 and Rakudo development, | ||
which ultimately informed the design and implementation of the current | ||
build system. | ||
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Shortly after the October 2009 (#22) release, the Rakudo team began a new | ||
branch of Rakudo development ("ng") that refactors the grammar to much more | ||
closely align with STD.pm as well as update some core features that have been | ||
difficult to achieve in the master branch [2, 3]. We had planned for | ||
this release to be created from the new branch, but holiday vacations | ||
and other factors conspired against us. This is absolutely the final | ||
release from the old development branch; we expect to make the new branch | ||
the official "master" branch shortly after this release. | ||
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This release of Rakudo requires Parrot 2.0.0. One must still | ||
perform "make install" in the Rakudo directory before the "perl6" | ||
executable will run anywhere other than the Rakudo build directory. | ||
For the latest information on building and using Rakudo Perl, see the | ||
readme file section titled "Building and invoking Rakudo". | ||
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Some of the specific changes and improvements occuring with this | ||
release include: | ||
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* Rakudo is now passing 31,957 spectests, or 85.7% of the available | ||
test suite. This is roughly the same level as the December 2009 | ||
release (because most effort has taken place in the "ng" branch | ||
as described above). | ||
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* Rakudo's calling conventions have been updated to match changes | ||
in Parrot 2.0.0's calling and context structures. | ||
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The Perl 6 language specification is still in flux. Please take note of the | ||
following changes, which might affect your existing programs. In the next | ||
release of Rakudo, the deprecated features will likely be gone. | ||
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* The root of the object hierarchy has been changed from 'Object' to 'Mu'. | ||
The type 'Object' goes away. | ||
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* The term 'undef' is gone. You can replace it with other constructs, | ||
depending on context: | ||
- 'Nil' is undefined in item context, and the empty list in list context | ||
- 'Mu' is the most general undefined value which does not flatten in list | ||
context | ||
- as a smart matching target, you can replace '$obj ~~ undef' | ||
by '$obj ~~ *.notdef' | ||
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* Builtin classes will derive from 'Cool' (which itself derives from 'Any'). | ||
Most of the builtin methods on these classes will be defined in the | ||
'Cool' class instead of 'Any'. See Synopsis 2 for more details. | ||
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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-compiler@perl.org | ||
mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode. | ||
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The next release of Rakudo (#26) is scheduled for February 18, 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. | ||
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Have fun! | ||
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[1] http://www.frozen-perl.org/ | ||
[2] http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/39779 | ||
[3] http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/39874 |