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Documentation updates for 2010.10 release.
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Announce: Rakudo Star - a useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6 | ||
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On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to | ||
announce the October 2010 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable | ||
distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the October 2010 release is | ||
available from <http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads>. | ||
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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. | ||
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In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language | ||
("Perl 6") and specific implementations of the language such as | ||
"Rakudo Perl". The October 2010 Star release includes release #34 | ||
of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 2.9.0 of the Parrot | ||
Virtual Machine [2], and various modules, documentation, | ||
and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community. | ||
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This release of Rakudo Star adds the following features over the | ||
previous Star release: | ||
* A simple implementation of 'require' | ||
* Local timezone is available in $*TZ | ||
* Implementations of ms// ss/// (samespace) | ||
* Speed improvements to Str.flip | ||
* Hyperoperator versions of += | ||
* Improved diagnostic messages and warning messages | ||
* True and False now stringify properly | ||
* Attribute modification via introspection | ||
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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 | ||
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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 <rakudobug@perl.org>. | ||
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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. | ||
An updated draft of a Perl 6 book is available as | ||
<docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf> in the release tarball. | ||
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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-compiler@perl.org | ||
mailing list, or join us on IRC #perl6 on freenode. | ||
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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 November 23, 2010. | ||
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[1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo | ||
[2] http://parrot.org/ | ||
[3] http://github.com/perl6/roast |