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authorTobias Leich <email@froggs.de>2014-08-30 23:19:16 +0200
committerTobias Leich <email@froggs.de>2014-08-30 23:19:16 +0200
commit008b70b1fe28d5c73978b8f75f2125fa62ec2a3b (patch)
tree4358d855c9acd4175c151aa72d2d8a6d8ab9c0b9
parent414b5d761fd526eb73150b1579fc7e45aad138b0 (diff)
add announcement for 2014.08
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-# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2014.04
+# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2014.08
## A useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6
diff --git a/docs/announce/2014.08.md b/docs/announce/2014.08.md
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+# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2014.08
+
+## 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 2014 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
+distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the August 2014 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.
+
+This is the first Rakudo Star release with support for the MoarVM
+backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms) along with
+experimental support for the JVM backend (some module tests fail).
+One shipped module is known to fail on Parrot (JSON::RPC).
+
+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 2014.08] of the
+[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 6.7.0 of the [Parrot Virtual
+Machine], version 2014.08 of [MoarVM], plus various modules,
+documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6
+community.
+
+[release 2014.08]:
+ https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2014.05.md
+ https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2014.06.md
+ https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2014.07.md
+ https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2014.08.md
+[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler]: http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
+[Parrot Virtual Machine]: http://parrot.org
+[MoarVM]: http://moarvm.org/
+
+Some of the new features added to this release include:
+
+* Many optimizations in both rakudo and the underlying VMs.
+* If the LOLLY envar is set, have (;;), [;;], etc., turn into LoLs. Otherwise, parsefail
+* Add SEQ(a; b) to emulate the old behavior of (a; b)
+* Make &infix:<xx> many times faster
+* fix multi-dimensional slice assignment
+* assigning a single itemized hash to a hash is now DEPRECATED (my %h = {...})
+* subbuf-rw specced and implemented
+* the tr/// operator is implemented and has the proper return value
+* improved string handling for MoarVM backend
+* all backends now allow C pointer arithmetic and casting of pointers to Perl 6 types (this funtionality is exposed by NativeCall)
+* fixed 'fail' so it also prints a backtrace
+* IO::Socket::Async now also works on JVM
+* added or updated many Supply methods: act, batch, categorize, Channel, classify, delay, elems, flat, grab, last, live, max, min, minmax, merge, migrate, Promise, reduce, reverse, rotor, sort, squish, stable, start, uniq, wait, zip
+* added IO::Notification.watch_path / IO::Path::watch which return a Supply of file system changes
+* added first-index, last-index, grep-index subs/methods
+* deprecate $*OS, $*OSVER, $*VM, $*VM, $*PERL $*PERL...
+* added $*KERNEL, $*DISTRO, $*VM, $*PERL as full blown objects
+* "use v5" is no longer a noop, but actually tries to load the "v5" module (soon available as part of Rakudo*)
+* implemented labeled loops and throwing of labels as payload
+
+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 (in work for the JVM and MoarVM backend)
+ * 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.