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+# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2017.04
+
+## A useful and usable production distribution of Perl 6
+
+On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm pleased to
+announce the April 2017 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
+production distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the April 2017 release
+is available from <http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/>.
+
+Binaries for macOS and Windows (64 bit) are also available.
+
+This is the seventh 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).
+
+This release includes "zef" as module installer.  "panda" is to be shortly
+replaced by "zef" and will be removed in the near future.
+
+It's hoped to produce quarterly Rakudo Star releases during 2017 with 2017.07
+(July) and 2017.10 (October) to follow.
+
+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 2017.04.3] of the [Rakudo Perl 6 compiler],
+version 2017.04-44-gf0db8822 of [MoarVM], plus various modules, documentation,
+and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.
+
+[release 2017.04]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rakudo/rakudo/2017.04/docs/announce/2017.04.md
+[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler]: http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
+[MoarVM]: http://moarvm.org/
+
+The Rakudo compiler changes since the last Rakudo Star release of 2017.01 are
+now listed in "2017.02.md" and "2017.04.md" under the "rakudo/docs/announce"
+directory of the source distribution.
+
+In particular This release featured many important improvements to the IO
+subsystem thanks to Zoffix and the support of the Perl Foundation.
+
+Please see 
+Part 1: http://rakudo.org/2017/04/02/upgrade
+Part 2: http://rakudo.org/2017/04/03/part-2
+Part 3: http://rakudo.org/2017/04/17/final-notes
+
+Note there were point releases of 2017.04 so also see "2017.04.1.md",
+"2017.04.2.md" and "2017.04.3.md".
+
+Notable changes in modules shipped with Rakudo Star:
+
+    + DBIish: New version with pg-consume-input
+    + doc: Too many to list. Large number of "IO Grant" doc changes.
+    + json\_fast: Too many to list. Big performance improvements.
+    + perl6-lwp-simple: Fix for lexical require and incorrect regex for absolute URL matcher
+    + test-mock: Enable concurrent use of mock objects
+    + uri: Encoding fixes
+    + zef: Too many to list. IO fixage. 
+
+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)
+  * some bits 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, presentations,
+reference materials, design documents, and other supporting resources.
+Some Perl 6 tutorials are available under the "docs" directory 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.