From darren at darrenduncan.net Thu Jul 29 12:15:09 2010 From: darren at darrenduncan.net (Darren Duncan) Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:15:09 -0700 Subject: [VPM] ANN - Rakudo Star - a useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6 Message-ID: <4C51D33D.5070801@darrenduncan.net> Greetings, I'm pleased to announce that Perl 6 has become sufficiently complete that one can now start to install and use it like they do a typical language, rather than having to jump through extra hoops. You can now get a complete combination of parts along with documentation and examples in a single package. New versions will generally be released on a monthly schedule. A forward of today's official announcement of "Rakudo Star", the name of this implementation package, is below the ==== line. See http://rakudo.org/announce/rakudo-star/2010.07 for a web copy of the same. See http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?rakudo_star_press over time for a collection of press coverage. I have had regular involvement in this project for the last 5+ years, particularly in the design discussions of Perl 6 and also in doing some testing of prior implementations by writing Perl 6 code. Now that a sufficiently mature Perl 6 implementation exists, as Rakudo Star, I expect within a couple months to be writing more serious Perl 6 code, including one of several implementations of my Muldis D language for object-relational DBMSs. (Other early Muldis D implementations will be over Perl 5 and over Postgres. Versions over other languages, such as Python or Ruby, may depend on advocates to help me out.) Enjoy! -- Darren Duncan ========================================================== -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Rakudo Star - a useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6 Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 07:23:35 -0500 From: Patrick R. Michaud To: perl6-language at perl.org, perl6-compiler at perl.org, perl6-users at perl.org, parrot-dev at lists.parrot.org On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to announce the July 2010 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the July 2010 release is available from . 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". "Rakudo Star" is a distribution that includes release #31 of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 2.6.0 of the Parrot Virtual Machine [2], and various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community. We plan to make Rakudo Star releases on a monthly schedule, with occasional special releases in response to important bugfixes or changes. Some of the many cool Perl 6 features that are available in this release of Rakudo Star: * Perl 6 grammars and regexes * formal parameter lists and signatures * metaoperators * gradual typing * a powerful object model, including roles and classes * lazy list evaluation * multiple dispatch * smart matching * junctions and autothreading * operator overloading (limited forms for now) * introspection * currying * a rich library of builtin operators, functions, and types * an interactive read-evaluation-print loop * Unicode at the codepoint level * resumable exceptions 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. Rakudo Star also bundles a number of modules; a partial list of the modules provided by this release include: * Blizkost - enables some Perl 5 modules to be used from within Rakudo Perl 6 * MiniDBI - a simple database interface for Rakudo Perl 6 * Zavolaj - call C library functions from Rakudo Perl 6 * SVG and SVG::Plot - create scalable vector graphics * HTTP::Daemon - a simple HTTP server * XML::Writer - generate XML * YAML - dump Perl 6 objects as YAML * Term::ANSIColor - color screen output using ANSI escape sequences * Test::Mock - create mock objects and check what methods were called * Math::Model - describe and run mathematical models * Config::INI - parse and write configuration files * File::Find - find files in a given directory * LWP::Simple - fetch resources from the web These are not considered "core Perl 6 modules", and as module development for Perl 6 continues to mature, future releases of Rakudo Star will likely come bundled with a different set of modules. Deprecation policies for bundled modules will be created over time, and other Perl 6 distributions may choose different sets of modules or policies. More information about Perl 6 modules can be found at http://modules.perl6.org/. Rakudo Star also contains a draft of a Perl 6 book -- see 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 , 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 August 24, 2010. [1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo [2] http://parrot.org/