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+# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2015.03
+
+## 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 March 2015 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
+distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the March 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 (the modules Bailador,
+Digest::MD5 and Grammar::Profiler::Simple are known to fail tests).
+
+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 2015.03] of the
+[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 2015.03 of [MoarVM], plus various
+modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the
+Perl 6 community.
+
+[release 2015.03]:
+    https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2015.03.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:
+
++ several renames of semi-internal methods. Please refer to [the Rakudo
+  2015.02 release notes](https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2015.03.md) for the full list
++ Allow Buf.AT-POS to return an l-value.
++ Implement method ^foo($) { ... } syntax.
++ Implemented PairMap (the simple case only, for now).
++ Implemented .antipairs (pairs with value => key).
++ Implemented .pairup for creating pairs from lists.
++ Implemented LEXICAL, OUTERS and CALLERS pseudo-packages
++ Add a array[T], usable for native int/num (MoarVM only for now)
++ Other native improvements, e.g. my int $a; $a++
++ Implement IO::Path.resolve on r-m/POSIX
+
+In future, the `nqp::` namespace willl only be available after a declaration
+like `use nqp;`.
+
+Changes to modules included in Rakudo Star:
+
+- [DBIish](https://github.com/perl6/DBIish) supports local Sockets on mysql,
+  and now correctly handles returned NULL values in the Pg backend
+- [doc](https://github.com/perl6/doc) ships with much more documentation
+
+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)
+  * 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.