From aa7e45c61ef277b5ad7ee05b943f3509014ca620 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Moritz Lenz Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2012 18:27:34 +0100 Subject: announcement for 2012.11 release --- docs/announce/2012.11 | 98 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 98 insertions(+) create mode 100644 docs/announce/2012.11 diff --git a/docs/announce/2012.11 b/docs/announce/2012.11 new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3a696e2 --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/announce/2012.11 @@ -0,0 +1,98 @@ +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 November 2012 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and +usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the November 2012 +release is available from . +A Windows .MSI version of Rakudo star will usually appear in +the downloads area shortly after the tarball release. + +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 2012.11 [0] of the +Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 4.6.0 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: + +* heredocs + +* implemented precedence related traits (equiv, looser, tighter, assoc) + +* Perl 6 grammar NFAs are pre-computed, saving some work on each + invocation; this shaved around 10% off the time needed to run the spectests + +* regexes and quotes have better support for user-selected delimiters + +* FIRST/NEXT/LAST can now be used in all types of loop (previously + limited to for) + +This release also contains a range of performance improvements, bug fixes, +improvements to error reporting and better failure modes. + +The following features have been deprecated or modified from previous +releases due to changes in the Perl 6 specification, and are being removed +or changed as follows: + +* at present, a reference to an &foo that does not exist evalutes to Nil. + This will become a CHECK-time failure, in line with STD. + +* Unary hyper ops currently descend into nested arrays and hashes. + This will change to make them equivalent to a one-level map. + +* ~/.perl6/lib will go away from the default include path (@*INC). + Instead %*CUSTOM_LIB now holds paths to four library locations: + perl Rakudo installs its core modules here + vendor OS-level package managers should install their modules here + site for local module installations (e.g. with panda or ufo) + home like site, but always under the user's home directory. + fallback if site isn't writable. + +* The Str.ucfirst builtin is deprecated; it will be replaced by Str.tc. + +* 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. + +* 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. + +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 + * Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints + * interactive readline that understands Unicode + * non-blocking I/O + * much of Synopsis 9 + +There is an online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features +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 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 draft of a Perl 6 book is available as +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 perl6-compiler@perl.org +mailing list, or join us on IRC #perl6 on freenode. + +[0] https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2012.11 +[1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo +[2] http://parrot.org/ -- cgit v1.1