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docs/announce/2014.01.md

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+# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2014.01
+
+## A useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6
+
+On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to
+announce the January 2014 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
+distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the January 2014 release is
+available from <http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/>. A Windows .MSI
+version of Rakudo star will usually appear in the downloads area
+shortly after the tarball release.
+
+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 2014.01] of the
+[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 5.9.0 of the [Parrot Virtual
+Machine], plus various modules, documentation, and other resources
+collected from the Perl 6 community.
+
+[release 2014.01]:
+    https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2014.01.md
+[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler]: http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
+[Parrot Virtual Machine]: http://parrot.org
+
+Some of the new features added to this release include:
+
++ The eval sub and method are now spelled EVAL
++ Numeric.narrow to coerce to narrowest type possible
++ Can now supply blocks with multiple arguments as sequence endpoints
++ Method calls and hash/list access on Nil give Nil
+
+This release also contains a range of bug fixes, improvements to error
+reporting and better failure modes.
+
+Please note that this release of Rakudo Star does not support the JVM
+nor the MoarVM backends from the Rakudo compiler. While the other backends
+mostly implement the same features as the Parrot backend, many bits are
+still missing, most prominently the native call interface.
+We hope to provide a JVM-based and MoarVM-based Rakudo Star releases soon.
+
+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:
+
+  * advanced macros
+  * threads and concurrency (in work for the JVM backend)
+  * Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints
+  * interactive readline that understands Unicode
+  * non-blocking I/O
+  * much of Synopsis 9 and 11
+
+There is an online resource at <http://perl6.org/compilers/features>
+that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo and
+other Perl 6 implementations.
+
+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>.
+
+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.
+
+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.