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 July 2012 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and
usable distribution of Perl 6.  The tarball for the July 2012
release is available from <http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads>.

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 2012.07 [0] of the
Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 4.6 of the Parrot Virtual
Machine [2], and various modules, documentation, and other
resources collected from the Perl 6 community.

<add note about deprecation issues>

Here are some of the major improvements in this release over the
previous distribution release.

...

This release also contains a range of bug fixes, improvements to error
reporting and better failure modes. More exceptions are thrown as typed
exceptions, and more meta-model errors have been fixed to properly
report line numbers.

The following features are deprecated due to changes in the Perl 6
specification, and will be removed or changed:

* IO::File and IO::Dir will go away, and &dir will return values of type
  IO::Path (which is currently the superclass of IO::File and IO::Dir).

* The method Str.bytes will be removed. To get the number of codepoints
  in a string, use .codes instead. To get the number of bytes in a
  given encoding, use $str.encode($encoding).bytes .
  Scheduled for the 2012.08 release.

* The method Str.lcfirst will be removed without replacement.
  Scheduled for the 2012.08 release.

* The method Str.ucfirst will eventually be removed, and replaced by
  Str.titlecase .
  No schedule yet, depends on having titlecase implemented first.

* 'abs' is currently a prefix operator, and will be changed to a normal
  subroutine.
  Scheduled for the 2012.08 release.

* the integer argument to IO::Socket.recv will be interpreted as number of
  codepoints
  Scheduled for the 2012.08 release.

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:

  * 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 a new online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features 
that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo Star
2012.07 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.
An updated 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/2012.07
[1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
[2] http://parrot.org/