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+# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2015.07
+
+## 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 July 2015 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
+distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the July 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).
+
+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 2015.07.2] of the
+[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 2015.07 of [MoarVM], plus various
+modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the
+Perl 6 community.
+
+[release 2015.07]:
+    https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2015.07.md
+[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler]: http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
+[MoarVM]: http://moarvm.org/
+
+Some of the new compiler features added to this release include:
+
+* Cool.substr(-rw) and &substr(-rw) now also accept a Range
+* Added trait "is required" on class attributes
+* &?ROUTINE and &?BLOCK
+* &words implemented (to completement .words)
+* Numeric comparison ops (== > etc) for DateTimes
+* samewith() now also works in subs
+* Calling the .clone method with alternate values no longer changes original
+* .grep and &grep now consume multiple elements for many-param blocks
+* ENTER phaser now can be used as an r-value
+
+Notable changes in modules in modules:
+
+* Bailador: Add links to documentation
+* DBIish: Use Postgres environment variables for test configuration
+* doc: More documentation, mostly for IO-related classes and methods
+
+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
+  * non-blocking I/O (in progress)
+  * 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.