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+# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2016.01
+
+## A useful and usable production distribution of Perl 6
+
+On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to announce
+the January 2016 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable production
+distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the January 2016 release is available
+from <http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/>.
+
+This is the first post-Christmas (production) release of Rakudo Star and
+implements Perl v6.c. It comes with support for the MoarVM backend (all module
+tests pass on supported platforms).
+
+Please note that this release of Rakudo Star is not fully functional with the
+JVM backend from the Rakudo compiler. Please use the MoarVM backend only.
+
+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 2016.01.1] of the [Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version
+2016.01 of [MoarVM], plus various modules, documentation, and other resources
+collected from the Perl 6 community.
+
+[release 2016.01]:
+    https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2016.01.md
+[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler]: http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
+[MoarVM]: http://moarvm.org/
+
+Some of the new compiler features since the last Rakudo Star release include:
+
++ Chained .grep calls on Supply fixed (RT #127297)
++ Fixed interaction with perl6-debug and precompilation that resulted in an
+  endless loop
++ re-enabled warning when smart-matching against a True or False literal
++ Fixed internal error when reporting certain type errors (RT #127207)
++ Fixed rare "duplicate definition of symbol" errors (RT #127107)
++ Fixed interpolating of pairs with non-key strings into signatures
++ Fixed error when smart-matching Seq against a Set (RT #127166)
++ Improved error message when smart-matching against an S///-expression
++ Fixed bad interaction between EXPORTHOW and multiple declarations (RT #126566)
++ Fixed various issues regarding precompilation
++ Improved accuracy of Complex.sqrt
++ hyper now preserves order of results, as designed
++ Range.sum on an empty, numeric Range is now 0
++ Fixed Promise.allof() with an empty list of promises (RT #127101)
++ Improved message on premature virtual method call (RT #127097)
++ Better error message for module load failures of types that are part of
+  the setting
++ Support for Readline in addition to Linenoise
++ 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
+
+Notable changes in modules shipped with Rakudo Star:
+
+* Bailador: The PSGI module by default now sets p6sgi instead of psgi
+* DBIish: Many fixes
+* Digest::MD5: Updated to conform to new newline handling 
+* doc: p6doc -l added. p6doc now works for most non-core docs with pod
+* LWP::Simple: Replace "as Int" with proper coercion type to fix build
+* Linenoise: Many fixes
+* MIME::Base64: Adjust to pack being made experimental
+* panda: Large number of precomp and other bug fixes.  Now depends on 6.c
+* Template::Mojo: use MONKEY-SEE-NO-EVAL
+* Shell::Command: removed "as"
+
+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.