From 008b70b1fe28d5c73978b8f75f2125fa62ec2a3b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Tobias Leich Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 23:19:16 +0200 Subject: add announcement for 2014.08 --- docs/announce/2014.04.md | 2 +- docs/announce/2014.08.md | 85 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 2 files changed, 86 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) create mode 100644 docs/announce/2014.08.md diff --git a/docs/announce/2014.04.md b/docs/announce/2014.04.md index 779ebe6..d5089f2 100644 --- a/docs/announce/2014.04.md +++ b/docs/announce/2014.04.md @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@ -# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2014.04 +# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2014.08 ## A useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6 diff --git a/docs/announce/2014.08.md b/docs/announce/2014.08.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f8538c0 --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/announce/2014.08.md @@ -0,0 +1,85 @@ +# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2014.08 + +## 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 August 2014 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable +distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the August 2014 release is +available from . A Windows .MSI +version of Rakudo star will usually appear in the downloads area +shortly after the tarball release. + +This is the first Rakudo Star release with support for the MoarVM +backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms) along with +experimental support for the JVM backend (some module tests fail). +One shipped module is known to fail on Parrot (JSON::RPC). + +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 2014.08] of the +[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 6.7.0 of the [Parrot Virtual +Machine], version 2014.08 of [MoarVM], plus various modules, +documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 +community. + +[release 2014.08]: + https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2014.05.md + https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2014.06.md + https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2014.07.md + https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2014.08.md +[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler]: http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo +[Parrot Virtual Machine]: http://parrot.org +[MoarVM]: http://moarvm.org/ + +Some of the new features added to this release include: + +* Many optimizations in both rakudo and the underlying VMs. +* If the LOLLY envar is set, have (;;), [;;], etc., turn into LoLs. Otherwise, parsefail +* Add SEQ(a; b) to emulate the old behavior of (a; b) +* Make &infix: many times faster +* fix multi-dimensional slice assignment +* assigning a single itemized hash to a hash is now DEPRECATED (my %h = {...}) +* subbuf-rw specced and implemented +* the tr/// operator is implemented and has the proper return value +* improved string handling for MoarVM backend +* all backends now allow C pointer arithmetic and casting of pointers to Perl 6 types (this funtionality is exposed by NativeCall) +* fixed 'fail' so it also prints a backtrace +* IO::Socket::Async now also works on JVM +* added or updated many Supply methods: act, batch, categorize, Channel, classify, delay, elems, flat, grab, last, live, max, min, minmax, merge, migrate, Promise, reduce, reverse, rotor, sort, squish, stable, start, uniq, wait, zip +* added IO::Notification.watch_path / IO::Path::watch which return a Supply of file system changes +* added first-index, last-index, grep-index subs/methods +* deprecate $*OS, $*OSVER, $*VM, $*VM, $*PERL $*PERL... +* added $*KERNEL, $*DISTRO, $*VM, $*PERL as full blown objects +* "use v5" is no longer a noop, but actually tries to load the "v5" module (soon available as part of Rakudo*) +* implemented labeled loops and throwing of labels as payload + +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 + * threads and concurrency (in work for the JVM and MoarVM backend) + * Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints + * interactive readline that understands Unicode + * non-blocking I/O + * much of Synopsis 9 and 11 + +There is an online resource at +that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo 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 . + +See for links to much more information about +Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference +materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A +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 +, ask on the +mailing list, or join us on IRC \#perl6 on freenode. -- cgit v1.1