From ac971435878e89e9001fcdd5815a2b9c073bb958 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Moritz Lenz Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 11:36:51 +0100 Subject: 2014.12 draft release announcement --- docs/announce/2014.12.md | 73 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 73 insertions(+) create mode 100644 docs/announce/2014.12.md diff --git a/docs/announce/2014.12.md b/docs/announce/2014.12.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9aef3f4 --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/announce/2014.12.md @@ -0,0 +1,73 @@ +# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2014.12 + +## 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 December 2014 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable +distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the December 2014 release is +available from . + +This Rakudo Star release comes 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). +Three shipped modules are known to fail on Parrot (JSON::RPC, +MIME::Base64 and p6doc). + +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 2014.12] of the +[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 6.9.0 of the [Parrot Virtual +Machine], version 2014.12 of [MoarVM], plus various modules, +documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 +community. + +[release 2014.12]: + https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2014.12.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: + +- Supply.lines/words and IO::Handle.words implemented +- &indir for scoped directory manipulations +- Varios performance improvements +- Method 'for' as an alias for 'map'. Map will stop flattening the list eventually, 'for' remains as it is n +- Method 'unique' as a successor for 'uniq' +- Introduce IO::Handle.slurp-rest for slurping rest from handle +- Fix tie-breaking issues with longest literal matching +- Method FALLBACK implemented +- $*DISTRO and $*KERNEL updated ($*DISTRO now actually report the Linux dist) +- Added Metamodel::Primitives, to open up more meta-programming possibilities + (publishing method caches, completely custom meta-objects, etc.) + +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 progress 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