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+# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2013.08
+
+## 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 August 2013 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
+distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the August 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 2013.08] of the
+[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 5.5.0 of the [Parrot Virtual
+Machine], plus various modules, documentation, and other resources
+collected from the Perl 6 community.
+
+[release 2013.08]:
+    https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2013.08.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:
+
+* `is default` traits on variables are now implemented
+* assigning Nil restores the default value
+* `Buf` is now a role, and Buf objects are immutable.
+* `printf` now correctly handles big integers
+* fixed handling of indented heredocs
+* `dir()` is now lazy
+
+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 small IO bits are still
+missing, rendering some crucial parts like the module installer unsable.
+We hope to provide a JVM-based Rakudo Star release soon.
+
+The following 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:<{ }>` will become
+    multi-subs rather than multi-methods. Both at_pos and at_key will
+    remain methods.
+
+  * Unary hyper ops currently descend into nested arrays and hashes.
+    This will change to make them equivalent to a one-level map.
+
+  * The Str.ucfirst builtin is deprecated; it will be replaced by
+    Str.tc.
+
+  * Leading whitespace in rules and under :sigspace will no longer be
+    converted to `<.ws>`.  For existing regexes that expect this
+    conversion, add a `<?>` in front of leading whitespace to make it
+    meta again.
+
+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
+
+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.