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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 August 2012 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and
usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the August 2012
release is available from <http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads>.
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 2012.08 [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.
Some of the new features added to this release include:
* Rakudo Star now includes a Perl 6 debugger! The debugger allows
single-stepping, setting breakpoints, variable inspection/modification,
regex debugging, and more! Enter "perl6-debug <script.pl>" to run
a script in debugging mode. Enter "help" from a debug prompt to
see the available commands.
* Memory usage of the build stage has been reduced by 35% - 40%. This
makes it possible to build and compile Rakudo Star on machines with
less memory (although 1.2GB may still be needed for some 64-bit
environments).
* Variables prefixed by | or \ in signatures are now sigilless, per updates
to the Perl 6 specification.
* Circularities in module loading are now detected.
* An improved inliner, allowing a wider range of routines to be inlined.
* Str.bytes and lcfirst have been removed. The tclc builtin
has been added.
* 'abs' is now a normal subroutine instead of a prefix operator.
* IO::File and IO::Dir have been removed.
* The integer argument to IO::Socket.recv is now interpreted as
a number of characters/codepoints.
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.
Starting with this release, we will also identify changes to the
implementation or specification that can cause breakages in existing
Perl 6 code. The following features have been deprecated or modified
due to changes in the Perl 6 specification, and are being removed
or changed as follows:
* Parameters preceded by a | or \ can no longer have a sigil.
* IO::Path.dir (which returns the directory part of the path) has been
renamed to IO::Path.directory. IO::Path.dir will be removed or
re-purposed.
* The Str.ucfirst builtin is deprecated; it will be replaced by Str.tc.
* The (experimental) LAZY statement prefix will soon be removed.
* 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.
Scheduled for the 2012.08 release.
* 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.
Scheduled for the 2012.08 release, but may end up in 2012.09 .
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
2012.08 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/2012.08
[1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
[2] http://parrot.org/
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