From 01e61d203bf5436241605142a26c7299a02fe314 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Moritz Lenz Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2012 09:27:57 +0100 Subject: 2012.12 star release announcement --- docs/announce/2012.12 | 95 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 95 insertions(+) create mode 100644 docs/announce/2012.12 (limited to 'docs') diff --git a/docs/announce/2012.12 b/docs/announce/2012.12 new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c246f62 --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/announce/2012.12 @@ -0,0 +1,95 @@ +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 December 2012 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and +usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the December 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: + +* Parse errors are much improved, and follow STD, the standard parser, + much more closely; they are more accurate and more information is given + +* Rakudo now keeps parsing after some less serious errors + +* Better errors for various parse failures + +* The junction autothreader is now an order of magnitude faster + +* Texas (ASCII) versions of the Set and Bag operators implemented + +* Nested Pairs now give correct .perl output + +* { a => $_ } now correctly considered a block, not a hash as before + +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: + +* 'for'-loops will become lazy, and are only evaluated eagerly in + eager or sink (void) context. This means that if a for-loop is + the last statement in a routine, it will usually run after the + routine has returned, so it cannot call return() anymore. + +* Unary hyper ops currently descend into nested arrays and hashes. + This will change to make them equivalent to a one-level map. + +* 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