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+# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2015.11
+
+## 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 November 2015 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
+distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the November 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 2015.11] of the
+[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 2015.11 of [MoarVM], plus various
+modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the
+Perl 6 community.
+
+[release 2015.11]:
+    https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2015.11.md
+[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler]: http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
+[MoarVM]: http://moarvm.org/
+
+Some of the new compiler features since the ast Rakudo Star release include:
+
++ There is now an `infix:<.>` operator that does method calls with slightly
+  looser precedence than the postfix unary method call.
++ New operator `infix o` for function composition
++ `fc` for Unicode-correct case folding implemented
++ grep now accepts :k, :v, :kv, :p attributes
++ `Supply.throttle` for rate-limiting
++ Array.push is now used for pushing one element (mostly); Array.append
+  exists for pushing multiple values. Same for `unshift`/`prepend`
++ Basic arithmetic operations (`+`, `*`, `-`, `/`) on Range objects
+  that shift or scale the end points while maintaining exclusions
++ The v notation now allows alphabetic components: v1.2.beta.  (Incompatible
+  because method calls on a version must be protected by \ or () now.)
++ `use v6b+;` notation is now recognized and enforced
++ Many built-in methods that return iterables are now much faster
++ Better error messages when comparing version strings with numbers
++ Several error messages that were lacking line numbers now include them
++ Initial shaped array support
++ `\r\n` (Carriage Return/LineFeed) is now a single (synthetic) grapheme
++ Unicode support adheres to Unicode Annex #29
++ Unicode quotes are now also allowed in regular expressions
++ Improved newline support with "use newline" and updates to IO::Handle
++ Added List.head, List.tail, List.repeated methods
++ Str.encode now allows :replacement parameter for unencodable sequences
++ Str.split now accepts multiple strings to split on
++ New Range.int-bounds returns first/last value for integer ranges
++ Auto-generated meta-ops vivified by referring to them, instead of executing
++ Illegal assignment of different Numeric values now caught at compile time
++ `&nextcallee` implemented, which returns the routine that `nextsame` would invoke
++ Many speedups
+
+
+Please note that this release of Rakudo Star is not fully functional with the
+JVM backend from the Rakudo compiler. Support should be restored shortly.
+
+Notable changes in modules shipped with Rakudo Star:
+
+* Bailador: Add MIT License
+* DBIish: Improved Windows support
+* doc: More documentation; generated HTML is better searchable
+* Template::Mustache: Switchted from LGPL to Artistic License 2.0
+* panda: Default action is no longer `install`; better help messages
+* Digest::MD5: Now accepts non-ASCII input (internally encodes as Latin-1)
+* LWP::Simple: Support for successful return codes besides 200
+* Shell::Command: `which` routine for locating executables
+
+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
+Perl 6 tutorial is available as docs/2015-spw-perl6-course.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.