[Purdue-pm] Rakudo Star 2010.08 released

[Mark Senn]

>Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2010 11:11:07 -0500
>From: "Patrick R. Michaud" <pmichaud at pobox.com>
>To: perl6-compiler at perl.org, perl6-language at perl.org, perl6-users at perl.org,
>        parrot-dev at lists.parrot.org
>Subject: Announce: Rakudo Star 2010.08 released
>
>On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to
>announce the August 2010 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
>distribution of Perl 6.  The tarball for the August 2010 release is
>available from <http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads>.
>
>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.
>
>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 August 2010 Star release includes release #32
>of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 2.7.0 of the Parrot 
>Virtual Machine [2], and various modules, documentation,
>and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.
>
>This release of Rakudo Star adds the following features over the
>previous Star release:
>  * Nil is now undefined
>  * Many regex modifiers are now recognized on the outside of regexes
>  * Mathematic and range operations are now faster (they're still slow,
>    but they're significantly faster than they were in the previous release)
>  * Initial implementations of .pack and .unpack
>  * MAIN can parse short arguments
>  * Removed a significant memory leak for loops and other repeated blocks
>
>This release (temporarily?) omits the Config::INI module that was
>included in the 2010.07 release, as it no longer builds with the 
>shipped version of Rakudo.  We hope to see Config::INI return soon.
>
>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
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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 at perl.org
>mailing list, or join us on IRC #perl6 on freenode.
>
>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 September 28, 2010.
>
>[1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
>[2] http://parrot.org/