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# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2015.01 | ||
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## 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 January 2015 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable | ||
distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the January 2015 release is | ||
available from <http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/>. | ||
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This Rakudo Star release comes with support for the MoarVM | ||
backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms) along with | ||
experimental support for the JVM backend (some module tests fail). | ||
Three shipped modules are known to fail on Parrot (zavolaj (NativeCall), | ||
jsonrpc and doc) | ||
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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". This Star release includes [release 2015.01.1] of the | ||
[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 7.0.1 of the [Parrot Virtual | ||
Machine], version 2015.01 of [MoarVM], plus various modules, | ||
documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 | ||
community. | ||
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[release 2015.01.1]: | ||
https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2015.01.md | ||
[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler]: http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo | ||
[Parrot Virtual Machine]: http://parrot.org | ||
[MoarVM]: http://moarvm.org/ | ||
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Some of the new compiler features added to this release include: | ||
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+ Many improvements to Java interop for the JVM backend | ||
+ New simple way of creating an object hash: :{} | ||
+ Substitution now supports assignment meta-op, e.g. s[\d+] += 2 | ||
+ Many memory and CPU optimizations | ||
+ Supply.for deprecated in favour of Supply.from-list | ||
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Changes to modules included in Rakudo Star: | ||
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- [Bailador](https://github.com/tadzik/Bailador) handles POST and URL params separately | ||
- [ÐBIish](https://github.com/perl6/DBIish) has improved error reporting on SQLite | ||
- [doc](https://github.com/perl6/doc) ships with much more documentation | ||
- [panda](https://github.com/tadzik/panda) has a new command `installdeps` | ||
- [Pod::To::HTML](https://github.com/perl6/Pod-To-HTML) now supports callbacks for code areas | ||
- [HTTP::Easy](https://github.com/supernovus/perl6-http-easy) has received a few algorithm optimizations that made it faster. | ||
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In the next Rakudo Star release, modules `Math::RungeKutta` and `Math::Model` | ||
will likely be dropped. They can still be installed with `panda`. | ||
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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. | ||
Some of the not-quite-there features include: | ||
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* advanced macros | ||
* threads and concurrency (in progress for the JVM and MoarVM backend) | ||
* Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints | ||
* interactive readline that understands Unicode | ||
* non-blocking I/O (in progress for the JVM and MoarVM backend) | ||
* much of Synopsis 9 and 11 | ||
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There is an online resource at <http://perl6.org/compilers/features> | ||
that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo's | ||
backends and other Perl 6 implementations. | ||
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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. A | ||
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. |