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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 July 2011 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
+distribution of Perl 6.  The tarball for the July 2011 release is
+available from <http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads>.
+
+IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT UPCOMING RELEASES: This is the last Rakudo Star 
+release to use a compiler from the current "master" branch of Rakudo.
+For the past several months, Rakudo compiler development has
+primarily occurred in a separate "nom" ("New Object Model") branch of 
+its repository.  Shortly after this release, the "nom" branch will 
+become the new "master" branch and will be the source for future 
+compiler and Star releases.
+
+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 July 2011 Star release includes release #43
+of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 3.6.0 of the Parrot 
+Virtual Machine [2], and various modules, documentation,
+and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.
+
+The Rakudo team plans to issue another distribution release
+in August 2011 based on the new "nom" compiler.  The new
+compiler contains many improvements over the current line
+of development (including vastly improved performance), but also 
+will not be 100% backwards-compatible due to changes in the 
+Perl 6 language specification and elimination of some workarounds.  
+Existing Rakudo Star users looking for stability should continue 
+to use the July 2011 release as the new distribution releases 
+stabilize over the next several months.
+
+Details about deprecations and migration guidelines will be
+provided in future releases and on rakudo.org .
+
+This release of Rakudo Star adds the following features over the
+previous Star release:
+  * 10%-30% improvement in compile and execution speed
+  * New gcd (greatest common divisor) and lcm (largest common multiple) operators
+  * Int.base
+  * Call counter for Perl 6-level subroutines
+  * Better handling of &infix:<=> right associativity
+  * Fix bug in exponentiation of negative numbers
+  * Fix building on systems with smaller RAM
+
+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:
+  * 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 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/