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+# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2015.01
+
+## 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 January 2015 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
+distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the January 2015 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 (zavolaj (NativeCall),
+jsonrpc and doc)
+
+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 2015.01.1] of the
+[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 7.0.1 of the [Parrot Virtual
+Machine], version 2015.01 of [MoarVM], plus various modules,
+documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6
+community.
+
+[release 2015.01.1]:
+    https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2015.01.md
+[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler]: http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
+[Parrot Virtual Machine]: http://parrot.org
+[MoarVM]: http://moarvm.org/
+
+Some of the new compiler features added to this release include:
+
++ Many improvements to Java interop for the JVM backend
++ New simple way of creating an object hash: :{}
++ Substitution now supports assignment meta-op, e.g. s[\d+] += 2
++ Many memory and CPU optimizations
++ Supply.for deprecated in favour of Supply.from-list
+
+Changes to modules included in Rakudo Star:
+
+- [Bailador](https://github.com/tadzik/Bailador) handles POST and URL params separately
+- [ÐBIish](https://github.com/perl6/DBIish) has improved error reporting on SQLite
+- [doc](https://github.com/perl6/doc) ships with much more documentation
+- [panda](https://github.com/tadzik/panda) has a new command `installdeps`
+- [Pod::To::HTML](https://github.com/perl6/Pod-To-HTML) now supports callbacks for code areas
+- [HTTP::Easy](https://github.com/supernovus/perl6-http-easy) has received a few algorithm optimizations that made it faster.
+
+In the next Rakudo Star release, modules `Math::RungeKutta` and `Math::Model`
+will likely be dropped. They can still be installed with `panda`.
+
+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 (in progress for the JVM and MoarVM backend)
+  * 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's
+backends 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.