Announce: Niecza Perl 6 v10
This is the tenth release of Niecza Perl 6, as usual scheduled on
the last Monday of the month.
You can obtain a build of Niecza from [1]. This build contains a
working compiler as a set of .exe and .dll files suitable for use with
Mono or Microsoft .NET. If you wish to follow latest developments,
you can obtain the source from [2]; however, you will still need a
binary for bootstrapping, so you gain nothing from a "source is
better" perspective.
Niecza is a Perl 6 compiler project studying questions about the
efficient implementability of Perl 6 features. It currently targets
the Common Language Runtime; both Mono and Microsoft .NET are known to
work. On Windows, Cygwin is required for source builds only; see the
README for details.
List of changes
[Major features]
CLR interoperation is now fairly well supported! You can create
objects, call methods, get and set fields and properties, create
delegates, etc from Perl 6 code. See examples/ for usage ideas.
(Examples by Martin Berends)
The Mono.Posix dependency has been relaxed from load time to run
time, meaning .NET support is back if you don't use file tests.
[Minor new features]
\qq[] syntax is now implemented.
qp|| now returns a path object.
New Test.pm6 methods succeeds_ok and fails_ok (and eval_ variants) to
catch warnings. (Design by flussence)
@foo? and %foo? in signatures are now correctly supported.
Many more trig functions now implemented. (Solomon Foster)
Standard grammar has been updated, in particular bringing the new
concept of regex separators; x ** y is now spelled x+ % y. Do
not expect other forms of % and %% to work just yet.
[Selected bug fixes]
sqrt now returns the correct value for arguments with a negative
imaginary part. Also sqrt(0) returns Num not Complex now.
[Other]
docs/compiler.pod is more current. (Martin Berends)
Prototyping has begun on Perl 5 interoperation. (Paweł Murias)
Getting involved
Contact sorear in irc.freenode.net #perl6 or via the sender address of
this mailing. Also check out the TODO file; whether you want to work
on stuff on it, or have cool ideas to add to it, both are good.
Future directions
I have an active branch (started this month) to unify compile-time and
run-time metamodel representations, using serialization to bridge the
gap. It doesn't work yet, but when it does it will enable many
improvements, most importantly real support for BEGIN and roles.
[1] https://github.com/downloads/sorear/niecza/niecza-10.zip
[2] https://github.com/sorear/niecza
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