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 alone, continue to 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/