2011.11

    Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 compiler development release #46 ("London")

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm happy to announce the
November 2011 release of Rakudo Perl #46 "London".  Rakudo is an 
implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see 
<http://www.parrot.org>). The tarball for this release
is available from <http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads>.

Please note: This announcement is not for the Rakudo Star
distribution[*] -- it's announcing a new release of the compiler only.
For the latest Rakudo Star release, see
<http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads>.

The Rakudo Perl compiler follows a monthly release cycle, with each
release named after a Perl Mongers group.  The November 2011 release is
code named after the London Perl Mongers, organizers of many London Perl
Workshops, including the 2011 edition that took place this month. Over
200 people showed up for this great event, which had some Perl 6 talks
amongst the schedule.

This compiler release is from the latest development branch of Rakudo.
It brings many exciting improvements, but also some regressions compared
to the compiler release shipped with the latest Rakudo Star distribution.
If your primary interest is that your existing code running on Rakudo Perl
continues to work, we suggest sticking with the Rakudo Star distribution
release for a little longer; we are aiming to issue a Rakudo Star based on
this development branch in December. If instead you want to play with the
latest in Rakudo development - including meta-programming and performance
improvements - try this release.

Some of the specific changes and improvements occurring with this
release include:

* Big integer support
* Basic protoregex support with NFA-driven LTM for some declarative
  constructs
* CATCH blocks are now much closer to spec, and thus much more useful
* Improved support for MAIN argument parsing

We are still regressed on a few features just as in the previous
release. These regressions should be rectified in coming releases.

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, as well as those people who worked on 
Parrot, the Perl 6 test suite and the specification.

The following people contributed to this release:

Jonathan Worthington, Moritz Lenz, Will "Coke" Coleda, Tadeusz Sośnierz, 
Geoffrey Broadwell, Solomon Foster, Jonathan Scott Duff,
Michael Schroeder, Carl Masak, Geoff Broadwell, not_gerd and coto

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.

The next release of Rakudo (#47) is scheduled for December 22, 2011. A
list of the other planned release dates and code names for 2011 is
available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file.  In general, Rakudo
development releases are scheduled to occur soon after each Parrot
monthly release.  Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month.

Have a great deal of fun!


[*] What's the difference between the Rakudo compiler and the Rakudo
    Star distribution?  

    The Rakudo compiler is a compiler for the Perl 6 language.
    Nothing else.

    The Rakudo Star distribution is the Rakudo compiler plus a selection
    of useful Perl 6 modules, the most recent incarnation of the "Using
    Perl 6" book, and other software that can be used with the Rakudo
    compiler to enchance its utility.  Rakudo Star is meant for early
    adopters who wish to explore what's possible with Rakudo Perl 6 and
    provide feedback on what works, what doesn't, and what else they
    would like to see included in the distribution.