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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 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).
* 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.
* 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/
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