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+# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2013.10
+
+## 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 October 2013 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
+distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the October 2013 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 2013.10] 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 2013.10]:
+    https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2013.10.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:
+
++ postcircumfix {} and [] are now implemented as multi subs rather than multi methods.
++ Add support for "is deprecated", making it easy for early adopters to stay current.
++ Track multiple spec changes for various container classes.
++ Greatly reduce object creation during Regex parsing.
++ Various portability fixes.
++ qx// and run() now auto-quote correctly.
++ Allow #`[...]-style comments in regexes.
++ unlink() behaves like P5's, it deletes write-protected files on Windows.
+
+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
+backend from the Rakudo compiler. While the JVM backend mostly implements
+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 Rakudo Star release soon.
+
+The following notable features have been deprecated or modified from previous
+releases due to changes in the Perl 6 specification, and are planned to be
+removed or changed as follows:
+
+  * `postcircumfix:<[ ]>` and `postcircumfix:<{ }>` are now multi-subs rather
+    than multi-methods. Both at_pos and at_key remain as methods.
+
+  * All unary hyper ops currently descend into nested arrays and
+    hashes. In the next release, those operators and methods that are
+    defined "nodal" will behave like a one-level map.
+
+  * The Str.ucfirst builtin is deprecated; it will be replaced by
+    Str.tc. In this Rakudo Star release, use of Str.ucfirst will actually
+    generate a warning upon first usage.
+
+  * In the next release, leading whitespace in rules and under :sigspace will no
+    longer be converted to `<.ws>`. For existing regexes that expect this
+    conversion now and in the future, add a `<?>` in front of leading whitespace
+    to replicate the old behavior. (Adding `<?>` today will have no adverse
+    effects on your code.)
+
+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
+  * 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.