announce.v12

    Announce: Niecza Perl 6 v12

This is the twelth release of Niecza Perl 6, as usual scheduled on
the last Monday of the month.  I've not had very much time for Niecza
this month.  This release marks one year since the first public release,
and about a year and a half since the project began.  It's hard to
believe I've been at it this long.

You can obtain a build of Niecza from [1].  This build contains a
working compiler as a set of .exe and .dll files suitable for use with
Mono or Microsoft .NET.  If you wish to follow latest developments,
you can obtain the source from [2]; however, you will still need a
binary for bootstrapping, so you gain nothing from a "source is
better" perspective.

Niecza is a Perl 6 compiler project studying questions about the
efficient implementability of Perl 6 features.  It currently targets
the Common Language Runtime; both Mono and Microsoft .NET are known to
work.  On Windows, Cygwin is required for source builds only; see the
README for details.


    List of changes

[Minor features]

:BASE<DIGITS> literals are now supported.  (Solomon Foster)



[Bug fixes]

sqrt(-1) is NaN, complex math is strictly opt-in (#64).

Undefined values can be passed correctly to CLR interop (#66).

-I is now mentioned by --help (#52).

Constants, including 'our constant's, are now truly immutable (#46).

$@ and $^X now properly handled as the last characters in the file (#63).

Left side of xx is now autothunkified so [] xx 4 works correctly (#70).



[Other]

The internals documentation has been largely rewritten to match the
refactor in v11.

Added a copy of Martin Berends' London Perl Workshop slides.


    Getting involved

Contact sorear in irc.freenode.net #perl6 or via the sender address of
this mailing.  Also check out the TODO file; whether you want to work
on stuff on it, or have cool ideas to add to it, both are good.

    Future directions

My current priorities are:
 1. Make regexes much more feature-complete, including general Unicode
    properties and grapheme mode
 2. Prototype the debugger
 3. 6model convergence work, including roles/native types
 4. Figure out how modules and S11 stuff should work in Niecza.  Do it.


[1] https://github.com/downloads/sorear/niecza/niecza-12.zip
[2] https://github.com/sorear/niecza