2014.12 draft release announcement

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+# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2014.12
+
+## 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 December 2014 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
+distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the December 2014 release is
+available from <http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/>.
+
+This Rakudo Star release comes 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).
+Three shipped modules are known to fail on Parrot (JSON::RPC,
+MIME::Base64 and p6doc).
+
+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 2014.12] of the
+[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 6.9.0 of the [Parrot Virtual
+Machine], version 2014.12 of [MoarVM], plus various modules,
+documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6
+community.
+
+[release 2014.12]:
+    https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2014.12.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:
+
+- Supply.lines/words and IO::Handle.words implemented
+- &indir for scoped directory manipulations
+- Varios performance improvements
+- Method 'for' as an alias for 'map'. Map will stop flattening the list eventually, 'for' remains as it is n
+- Method 'unique' as a successor for 'uniq'
+- Introduce IO::Handle.slurp-rest for slurping rest from handle
+- Fix tie-breaking issues with longest literal matching
+- Method FALLBACK implemented
+- $*DISTRO and $*KERNEL updated ($*DISTRO now actually report the Linux dist)
+- Added Metamodel::Primitives, to open up more meta-programming possibilities
+  (publishing method caches, completely custom meta-objects, etc.)
+
+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 progress 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.