First draft of the 2012.01 release announcement for Star.

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+Announce: Rakudo Star - 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 2012 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and
+usable distribution of Perl 6.  The tarball for the January 2012
+release is available from <http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads>.
+
+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 #48 of the
+Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 4.0.0 of the Parrot Virtual
+Machine [2], and various modules, documentation, and other
+resources collected from the Perl 6 community.
+
+Significantly, this is the first distribution release based on the
+"nom" (New Object Model) development branch of Rakudo. This work
+has been carried out with the aim of increasing performance and
+correctness, as well as providing a better base for taking on a
+range of missing features. Here are some of the major improvements
+in this release over the previous distribution release.
+
+* Greatly improved performance in many areas. For some scripts, this
+  release offers an order of magnitude performance improvement.
+
+* POD6 support, including the $=POD variable to make the POD available
+  at runtime and a --doc option to get at the POD
+
+* The Int type now has big integer semantics
+
+* Initial work on native types, which can be used to write much
+  more efficient code
+  
+* LTM-driven protoregexes
+
+* Meta-programming support, including custom meta-classes, overriding
+  method dispatch and much more
+  
+* Exception handling is much closer to the specification, and thus much
+  more useful
+
+* Better package handling, including true separate compilation, lexical
+  packages and better nested package handling
+
+* An optimizer, which improves generated code as well as catching
+  a range of issues at compile-time that previously made it to runtime
+
+* Backslash sequences in character classes
+
+* Stubbed methods from roles are now required, providing interface
+  style functionality
+
+* Typed arrays and hashes, as well as supporting for binding to
+  array and hash elements
+
+Due to improvements in the Perl 6 language specification, and
+changes to Rakudo to track them, some existing code will need
+changes. Here are some of the major differences to be aware of.
+
+* Attributes can no longer be initialized using "new" unless they
+  are declared as having an accessor; either give them one or write
+  a BUILD submethod
+
+* The proto keyword is no longer used to declare a multi-dispatch
+  fallback
+
+* You may no longer do 'filename'.lines; use 'filename'.IO.lines
+
+We have maintained backwards compatibility with some changed pieces
+of syntax, but will drop them in an upcoming release:
+
+* "<...>" in proto regex bodies; now this should be written "*"
+
+* The use of "**" with a separator in regexes; this is now done by
+  using "%" or "%%" on another quantifier
+
+While this release does contain a great number of improvements,
+unfortunately we have regressed in a few places. Of note:
+
+* Some cases of auto-vivification do not work
+
+* The binding of a capture against a signature literal is
+  broken
+  
+We will be working to restore this functionality for future
+Rakudo Star releases; if you depend heavily on it, you may
+wish to stick with the previous Rakudo Star release for
+another month. 
+  
+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:
+  * binary objects, pack and unpack
+  * macros
+  * threads and concurrency
+  * Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints
+  * pre and post constraints, and some other phasers
+  * interactive readline that understands Unicode
+  * non-blocking I/O
+  * much of Synopsis 9
+
+There is a new online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features 
+that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo Star
+2012.01 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.
+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@perl.org
+mailing list, or join us on IRC #perl6 on freenode.
+
+[1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
+[2] http://parrot.org/