# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2013.03
## 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 March 2013 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the March 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 2013.03] of the
[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 4.10.0 of the [Parrot Virtual
Machine], plus various modules, documentation, and other resources
collected from the Perl 6 community.
[release 2013.03]:
https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2013.03.md
[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler]: http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
[Parrot Virtual Machine]: http://parrot.org
Some of the new features added to this release include:
* ...
* ...
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
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 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
, ask on the
mailing list, or join us on IRC \#perl6 on freenode.