From ad603195cc64986f6b3bb462e40374a4becfdcc4 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Moritz Lenz Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2015 09:01:52 +0100 Subject: Draft release announcement for 2015.02 --- docs/announce/2015.02.md | 102 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 102 insertions(+) create mode 100644 docs/announce/2015.02.md (limited to 'docs/announce/2015.02.md') diff --git a/docs/announce/2015.02.md b/docs/announce/2015.02.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7cdb902 --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/announce/2015.02.md @@ -0,0 +1,102 @@ +# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2015.02 + +## 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 January 2015 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable +distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the January 2015 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 (zavolaj (NativeCall), +jsonrpc and doc) + +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 2015.02] of the +[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 6.10.0 of the [Parrot Virtual +Machine], version 2015.02 of [MoarVM], plus various modules, +documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 +community. + +[release 2015.02]: + https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2015.02.md +[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler]: http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo +[Parrot Virtual Machine]: http://parrot.org +[MoarVM]: http://moarvm.org/ + +Some of the new compiler features added to this release include: + ++ On MoarVM, symlinks are now followed. This means that e.g. a given path + can have both .l and .d be true, if the symlink points to a directory. + This behaviour now matches the behaviour on the Parrot and JVM backend, + therefore one could consider this a bug fix, rather than an incompatible + change. ++ Overriding invoke/postcircumfix:<( )> for type coercions (ex. MyType(...)) + now passes the function arguments as-is, rather than just passing a Capture + containing them. To get the old behavior, simply declare a Capture + parameter (|c). ++ "6;" at unit start is no longer a way to say "no strict;". It was deemed + to be a bad meme and huffmannized inappropriately. ++ Coercion syntax now works in signatures: sub foo(Str(Any) $a) { ... } + will take Any value as its first positional parameter, and coerce it to + Str before making it available in $a. Note that Str(Any) can be shortened + to Str(). ++ "sub MAIN;" (as in, rest of file is the MAIN unit) has been implemented. ++ Metaop "=" now respects the precedence of the op it is meta-ing. ++ Many optimizations, improved error messages and bugs fixed (over + 200 commits to Rakudo since the 2015.01 release). + +In future, the `nqp::` namespace willl only be available after a declaration +like `use nqp;`. + +Changes to modules included in Rakudo Star: + +- [JSON::Tiny](https://github.com/moritz/json) gives better error messages on invalid input +- [panda](https://github.com/tadzik/panda) givees better error messages when + projects.json is not a valid JSON file (for example due to ISP-level HTTP filtering) +- [doc](https://github.com/perl6/doc) ships with much more documentation +- [LWP::Simple](https://github.com/cosimo/perl6-lwp-simple) supports PUT and HEAD requests, + as well as TLS if [IO::Socket::SSL](https://github.com/sergot/io-socket-ssl/) is installed. + +The `Math::Model` and `Math::RungeKutta` modules no longer ship with Rakudo +Star. They can still be installed with `panda`. + +This is the last Rakudo Star release with support for the Parrot backend, +until volunteers are found that bring the Parrot backend in shape en par with +the other backends, and implement necessary features for upcoming changes. See +[this blog post](http://pmthium.com/2015/02/suspending-rakudo-parrot/) for +more information. + +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 (in progress for the JVM and MoarVM backend) + * much of Synopsis 9 and 11 + +There is an online resource at +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 . + +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