This is Rakudo Star, a useful, usable Perl 6 distribution for "early adopters". This is the 2014.08 release of Rakudo Star. Rakudo Star is Copyright (C) 2010 - 2014 by the Rakudo Star Team. License Information ------------------- Rakudo Star is distributed under the terms of the Artistic License 2.0. This distribution contains software collected from other sources; see the individual source subdirectories (in parrot/, rakudo/, MoarVM/ and modules/) for copyright and licensing information of those components. Overview -------- The Rakudo Perl 6 compiler can target MoarVM, the JVM, and the Parrot Virtual Machine. Rakudo Star fully supports MoarVM and Parrot; not all modules work on the JVM at present. You can choose to build and install Rakudo for one or more of these virtual machines at configure time. Build Prerequisites for Rakudo on MoarVM ---------------------------------------- To build Rakudo Star on MoarVM, you need at least a 'make' utility, a C compiler, and Perl 5.10.0 or newer. Building Rakudo on MoarVM needs a machine with a gigabyte of memory; for a 32-bit build, you may get by with less. Build Prerequisites for Rakudo on the JVM ----------------------------------------- To build Rakudo Star on the JVM, you need at least a 'make' utility, both 'java' and 'javac' available in your path, and Perl 5.10.0 or newer. The 'java' and 'javac' are obtained by installing a Java Development kit, for example openjdk-7 or the Oracle JDK. The newer the JDK you have the better; due to bugs in the invokedynamic instruction in early JDK7 releases, JDK7 update 21 or above is suggested. JDK8, if available, is better still. The build can complete within a gigabyte of memory. Build Prerequisites for Rakudo on Parrot ---------------------------------------- To build Rakudo Star on Parrot you need at least a 'make' utility, a C compiler, and Perl 5.10.0 or newer. You probably also want a machine with a fair amount of memory available: 1GB is known to be too small for building Rakudo on Parrot, while 2GB is generally known to be sufficient. In order to fully support Unicode, you'll also want to have the ICU library installed (http://site.icu-project.org/). Rakudo can run without ICU, but some Unicode-related features will not work properly. On Debian GNU/Linux or Ubuntu Linux, the necessary components for building Rakudo can be installed via the command aptitude install build-essential libicu-dev openjdk-7-jdk Readline support also requires the "libreadline-dev" library. On RedHat/Fedora/CentOS, the components can be installed with yum groupinstall development-tools yum install libicu-devel readline-devel Configuring Rakudo Star ----------------------- The easiest way to build Rakudo Star for a particular backend is: $ perl Configure.pl --backend=moar --gen-moar # MoarVM $ perl Configure.pl --backend=parrot --gen-parrot # Parrot $ perl Configure.pl --backend=jvm --gen-nqp # JVM You can also build for all backends: $ perl Configure.pl --backend=parrot,jvm,moar --gen-parrot --gen-moar Note that --gen-parrot automatically builds a Parrot for you, and --gen-moar does likewise. Both imply --gen-nqp, which builds NQP, a subset of Perl 6 that is used to implemented Rakudo. Configure this way, one or more Perl 6 executable and selected Perl 6 modules will be installed into the install/ subdirectory, which resides inside the source archive directory. Running make install will *not* install anything into /usr/local. If you want to change this behavior, specify the install prefix using the --prefix option. Building Rakudo Star -------------------- After configuration, build Rakudo Star with: $ make $ make install On some 64-bit systems Parrot installation reports the lack of, or an incomplete ICU installation. It may be required to add a symlink to help Parrot find the ICU library: # ln -s /usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/unicode /usr/include/unicode Once Rakudo Star is installed, you can run Perl 6 programs by doing: $ ./perl6 hello.pl Programs can also be run by adding the "install/bin" directory to your PATH environment variable. If the Rakudo compiler is invoked without an explicit script to run, it enters a small interactive mode that allows Perl 6 statements to be executed from the command line. Running the Perl 6 test suite ----------------------------- Entering "make rakudo-test" will run a small test suite that comes bundled with Rakudo. This is a simple suite of tests, designed to make sure that the Rakudo compiler is basically working and that it's capable of running a simple test harness. Running "make rakudo-spectest" will run the Perl 6 specification test suite ("roast") that was bundled with the Rakudo compiler release. Running "make modules-test" will run the test suites of any installed modules. The modules currently have to be installed (via 'make install' or 'make modules-install') before the tests can be run. Release information ------------------- Information about the current release is placed in the docs/ directory, here is a brief overview: docs/cheatsheet.txt — Perl 6 cheat sheet docs/announce/ — detailed release announcements Where to get help or answers to questions ----------------------------------------- The http://perl6.org/ website contains a great many links to resources for Perl 6 development, and is generally the starting point for information about Perl 6. There are several mailing lists, IRC channels, and wikis available with help for Perl 6 and Rakudo on Parrot. Figuring out the right one to use is often the biggest battle. Here are some rough guidelines: If you have a question about Perl 6 syntax or the right way to approach a problem using Perl 6, you probably want the perl6-users@perl.org mailing list. This list is primarily for the people who want to use Perl 6 to write programs, as opposed to those who are implementing or developing the Perl 6 language itself. Questions about the Rakudo compiler for Parrot and the Parrot compiler tools can go to perl6-compiler@perl.org. Discussion about Parrot itself generally takes place on parrot-dev@lists.parrot.org. The Rakudo and Parrot development teams tend to hang out on IRC a fair bit, on irc.freenode.net/#perl6 and irc.parrot.org/#parrot, respectively. Rakudo's official web site is http://rakudo.org/ , where you can find useful information for developers and users alike. Reporting bugs -------------- Bug reports about Rakudo Star or the Perl 6 specification should be sent to rakudobug@perl.org with the moniker [BUG] (including the brackets) at the start of the subject so that it gets appropriately tagged in the RT system (https://rt.perl.org/rt3/). Please include or attach any sample source code that exhibits the bug, and include either the release name/date or the git commit identifier. You find that information in the output from "perl6 --version". There's no need to Cc: the perl6-compiler mailing list, as the RT system will handle this on its own. Submitting patches ------------------ Patches to the Rakudo compiler itself should be submitted to 'rakudobug@perl.org'. Patches for individual modules should be submitted to the module authors (see the module source code for details). We'll generally accept patches in any form if we can get them to work, but unified diff from the 'git' command is greatly preferred. See further instructions in the rakudo/ subdirectory for more details. Other ways to create and submit patches are discussed at http://wiki.github.com/rakudo/rakudo/steps-to-create-a-patch. AUTHOR ------ Patrick Michaud (pmichaud@pobox.com) is the primary author and maintainer for Rakudo Star. See docs/CREDITS for further Rakudo Star authors, and */CREDITS for authors of other collected components.