From 083b8924a994fe010a19dec7887fdc65ec78042e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: pmichaud Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 08:25:55 -0500 Subject: Add draft release announcement for 2010.08 release. --- skel/docs/announce/2010.08 | 112 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 112 insertions(+) create mode 100644 skel/docs/announce/2010.08 (limited to 'skel/docs') diff --git a/skel/docs/announce/2010.08 b/skel/docs/announce/2010.08 new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2699bd3 --- /dev/null +++ b/skel/docs/announce/2010.08 @@ -0,0 +1,112 @@ +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 August 2010 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable +distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the August 2010 release is +available from . + +Rakudo Star is aimed at "early adopters" of Perl 6. We know that +it still has some bugs, it is far slower than it ought to be, and +there are some advanced pieces of the Perl 6 language specification +that aren't implemented yet. But Rakudo Perl 6 in its current form +is also proving to be viable (and fun) for developing applications +and exploring a great new language. These "Star" releases are +intended to make Perl 6 more widely available to programmers, grow +the Perl 6 codebase, and gain additional end-user feedback about the +Perl 6 language and Rakudo's implementation of it. + +In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language +("Perl 6") and specific implementations of the language such as +"Rakudo Perl". The August 2010 Star release includes release #32 +of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 2.7.0 of the Parrot +Virtual Machine [2], and various modules, documentation, +and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community. + +This release of Rakudo Star adds the following features over the +previous release: + * Nil is now undefined + * Many regex modifiers are now recognized on the outside of regexes + * Mathematic and range operations are now faster (they're still slow, + but they're significantly faster than they were in the previous release) + * Initial implementations of .pack and .unpack + * MAIN can parse short arguments + +There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not +yet handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming +releases. Thus, we do not consider Rakudo Star to be a +"Perl 6.0.0" or "1.0" release. Some of the not-quite-there +features include: + * nested package definitions + * binary objects, native types, pack and unpack + * typed arrays + * macros + * state variables + * threads and concurrency + * Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints + * pre and post constraints, and some other phasers + * interactive readline that understands Unicode + * backslash escapes in regex <[...]> character classes + * non-blocking I/O + * most of Synopsis 9 + * perl6doc or pod manipulation tools + +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. + +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. + +Rakudo Star also bundles a number of modules; a partial list of +the modules provided by this release include: + * Blizkost + - enables some Perl 5 modules to be used from within Rakudo Perl 6 + * MiniDBI + - a simple database interface for Rakudo Perl 6 + * Zavolaj + - call C library functions from Rakudo Perl 6 + * SVG and SVG::Plot + - create scalable vector graphics + * HTTP::Daemon + - a simple HTTP server + * XML::Writer + - generate XML + * YAML + - dump Perl 6 objects as YAML + * Term::ANSIColor + - color screen output using ANSI escape sequences + * Test::Mock + - create mock objects and check what methods were called + * Math::Model + - describe and run mathematical models + * Config::INI + - parse and write configuration files + * File::Find + - find files in a given directory + * LWP::Simple + - fetch resources from the web + +These are not considered "core Perl 6 modules", and as module +development for Perl 6 continues to mature, future releases +of Rakudo Star will likely come bundled with a different set +of modules. Deprecation policies for bundled modules will be +created over time, and other Perl 6 distributions may choose +different sets of modules or policies. More information about +Perl 6 modules can be found at http://modules.perl6.org/. + +Rakudo Star also contains a draft of a Perl 6 book -- see + 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. + +Rakudo Star releases are created on a monthly cycle or as needed +in response to important bug fixes or improvements. The next planned +release of Rakudo Star will be on September 28, 2010. + +[1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo +[2] http://parrot.org/ -- cgit v1.1