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+Announce: Rakudo Star - 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 July 2012 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and
+usable distribution of Perl 6.  The tarball for the July 2012
+release is available from <http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads>.
+
+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 2012.07 [0] of the
+Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 4.6 of the Parrot Virtual
+Machine [2], and various modules, documentation, and other
+resources collected from the Perl 6 community.
+
+Some of the new features added to this release include:
+
+* Built-in metaobjects (e.g. Metamodel::ClassHOW) now inherit from Any
+
+* &open now supports the :enc/:encoding option
+
+* anonymous subset types (e.g., 'subset :: of Int where { $_ > 0 }')
+
+* Rakudo Star now ships with the Template::Mojo module
+
+This release also contains a range of bug fixes, improvements to error
+reporting and better failure modes. More exceptions are thrown as typed
+exceptions, and more meta-model errors have been fixed to properly
+report line numbers.
+
+Starting with this release, we will also identify changes to the
+implementation or specification that can cause breakages in existing
+Perl 6 code.  The following features have been deprecated or modified
+due to changes in the Perl 6 specification, and are being removed
+or changed as follows:
+
+* IO::File and IO::Dir will go away, and &dir now returns values of type
+  IO::Path (which is currently the superclass of IO::File and IO::Dir).
+  The return values of &dir will still stringify to the base name of the
+  returned file and directory names, and you can call .path on them to
+  obtain the full path.
+
+* Leading whitespace in rules and under :sigspace will no longer be
+  converted to <.ws> .  For existing regexes that expect this conversion,
+  add a <?> in front of leading whitespace to make it meta again.
+  Scheduled for the 2012.08 release.
+
+* The ?-quantifier on captures in regexes currently binds the capture
+  slot to a List containing either zero or one Match objects; i.e., it
+  is equivalent to "** 0..1".  In the future, the ?-quantifier will
+  bind the slot directly to a captured Match or to Nil.  Existing code
+  can manage the transition by changing existing ?-quantifiers to
+  use "** 0..1", which will continue to return a List of matches.
+  Scheduled for the 2012.08 release, but may end up in 2012.09 .
+
+* The method Str.bytes will be removed. To get the number of codepoints
+  in a string, use .codes instead. To get the number of bytes in a
+  given encoding, use $str.encode($encoding).bytes .
+  Scheduled for the 2012.08 release.
+
+* The method Str.lcfirst will be removed without replacement.
+  Scheduled for the 2012.08 release.
+
+* The method Str.ucfirst will eventually be removed, and replaced by
+  Str.tc.
+  No schedule yet, depends on having tc implemented first.
+
+* 'abs' is currently a prefix operator, and will be changed to a normal
+  subroutine.
+  Scheduled for the 2012.08 release.
+
+* The integer argument to IO::Socket.recv will be interpreted as number of
+  characters/codepoints.
+  Scheduled for the 2012.08 release.
+
+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:
+
+  * macros
+  * threads and concurrency
+  * Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints
+  * interactive readline that understands Unicode
+  * non-blocking I/O
+  * much of Synopsis 9
+
+There is a new online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features 
+that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo Star
+2012.07 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.
+An updated 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.
+
+[0] https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2012.07
+[1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
+[2] http://parrot.org/