From bc1db22f6c6eac5d70bd6318ab306e5b061a660d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Moritz Lenz Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2013 17:59:06 +0100 Subject: draft release announcement for 2013.02 --- docs/announce/2013.02 | 97 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 97 insertions(+) create mode 100644 docs/announce/2013.02 (limited to 'docs') diff --git a/docs/announce/2013.02 b/docs/announce/2013.02 new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2aa102a --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/announce/2013.02 @@ -0,0 +1,97 @@ +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 February 2013 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and +usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the February 2013 +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 2013.02.1 [0] of the +Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 4.10.0 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: + +* "Did you mean ..." suggestions for symbol-not-found errors + +* Compile-time optimization of some cases of junctions in boolean context + +* IO::Socket.get now works again with non-ASCII characters + +* constant folding for routines marked as 'is pure' + +* natively typed variables and better error reporting in the REPL + +* speed up eqv-comparison of Bufs + +* warnings for useless use of (some) literals, variables and constant + expressions in sink context + + +This release also contains a range of 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: + +* .gist on a type object will return '(Typename)' instead of 'Typename()'. + If you want to get the class name directly, use $obj.^name + +* postcircumfix:<[ ]> and postcircumfix:<{ }> will become multi-subs rather + than multi-methods. Both at_pos and at_key will remain methods. + +* 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/2013.01 +[1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo +[2] http://parrot.org/ -- cgit v1.1