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 January 2013 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and
usable distribution of Perl 6.  The tarball for the  January 2013
release is available from <http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/>.
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 2013.01 [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:

* Sink context (what some other languages call void context) is now enforced
  correctly. This means that for-loops are now lazy by default. It fixes the
  bug where a map in sink context would not execute, and also means that a
  Failure returned to sink context will be properly thrown.

* 'require' now works with indirect module names
  
* Restored socket read semantics to returning the requested number of bytes

* $obj.Some::Role::meth() now passes the correct $obj

* try/CATCH now returns Nil when the CATCH is triggered, rather than the
  exception; this brings it in line with try without a CATCH

* whatever-star cases of splice now implemented

* can now import multis with the same name from different modules,
  provided all dispatchers are onlystar

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:

* 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 <rakudobug@perl.org>.

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 <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 <http://rakudo.org/how-to-help>, 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/