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+# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2018.04
+
+## A useful and usable production distribution of Rakudo Perl 6
+
+On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm pleased to announce
+the April 2018 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable production
+distribution of Rakudo Perl 6.  The tarball for this release is available from
+<https://rakudo.perl6.org/downloads/star/>.  
+
+Binaries for macOS and Windows (64 bit) are also available at the same
+location.
+
+This is a 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).  Currently, Star is on a quarterly release cycle. 
+
+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 6".
+
+This Star release includes [release 2018.04] of the [Rakudo Perl 6 compiler],
+version 2018.04 [MoarVM], plus various modules, documentation, and other
+resources collected from the Perl 6 community.
+
+[release 2018.04]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rakudo/rakudo/2018.04/docs/announce/2018.04.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 2017.10 are
+now listed in "2018.02.md", "2018.03.md", and "2018.04.md" under the
+"rakudo/docs/announce" directory of the source distribution.
+
+Important Rakudo bug fixes are now listed at 
+[Perl 6 Alerts]: https://alerts.perl6.org/
+
+Deprecation:
+
+    + "panda" has been removed from releases after 2017.10 since it is
+deprecated.  Please use "zef".
+    + LWP::Simple is deprecated and will be removed. Please use "HTTP::UserAgent".
+
+Notable changes in modules shipped with Rakudo Star:
+
+    + JSON-Class: Alter the way in which the re-exporting of the traits works
+    + JSON-Marshal: Fix for associative and positional type objects
+    + Pod-To-HTML: Document P6DOC\_DEBUG 
+    + datetime-parse: New. Dependency of http-useragent
+    + doc: Too many to list.
+    + http-useragent: New. Intended as replacement for LWP::Simple (now deprecated)
+    + json\_fast: fix off-by-one in treacherous escape detection
+    + perl6-lwp-simple: HTML header names with mixed case fix
+    + svg: Fix example in README
+    + tap-harness6: Make TAP parsing loose by default before rakudo 2017.09 in prove too
+    + zef: Warns about missing META6.json. Sort "list" output.
+
+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
+  * 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 <https://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.