On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm glad to announce the August 2012 release of Rakudo Perl #55 "Frankfurt". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see <http://www.parrot.org>). The tarball for this release is available from <http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads>.
Please note: This announcement is not for the Rakudo Star distribution[*] -- it's announcing a new release of the compiler only. For the latest Rakudo Star release, see <http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads>. The Rakudo Perl compiler follows a monthly release cycle, with each release named after a Perl Mongers group. The August 2012 release is code-named after Frankfurt.pm, the group that hosted this year's YAPC::Europe conference in Frankfurt am Mein. This release brings a massive amount of changes; some of them are outlined below: - Memory usage of build stage is reduced by 35% - 40% - Sigilless variables in signatures (prefixed by | or \) - Blocks that declare variables don't turn into hash constuctors anymore - Better error reporting for traits - --> ReturnType in signatures and prefix type constraints of routine return types are now honored - Circularities in module loading are now detected - Improvements in inliner, which allow it to inline a wider range of routines Some features have been deprecated: - Parameters preceeded by a | or \ may not have a sigil anymore. sub f(\$x) { say $x } must be changed to sub f(\x) { say x } Usage of \$x will unconditionally warn in 2012.09 and be removed in 2012.10 - 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 in 2012.09 - The LAZY statement prefix will be removed in 2012.09. It was a non-specced experiment and did not work out well. This is only a small peek at the changes in this release. For a more detailed list, see "docs/ChangeLog". The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Perl possible, as well as those people who worked on Parrot, the Perl 6 test suite and the specification. The following people contributed to this release: Jonathan Worthington, Moritz Lenz, Arne Skjærholt, Geoffrey Broadwell, Will "Coke" Coleda, Tadeusz Sośnierz, Patrick R. Michaud, Felix Herrmann, Carl Mäsak, kboga, thou, Brian Gernhardt, Stefan O'Rear, GlitchMr, ChoHag, Larry Wall and lumi_ If you would like to contribute, see <http://rakudo.org/how-to-help>, ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.org mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode. The next release of Rakudo (#56) is scheduled for September 20, 2012. A list of the other planned release dates and code names for 2012 is available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file. In general, Rakudo development releases are scheduled to occur soon after each Parrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month. On behalf of the development team, I encourage you to try the new release, to live life to its fullest, to cherish each moment, and to have fun. [*] What's the difference between the Rakudo compiler and the Rakudo Star distribution? The Rakudo compiler is a compiler for the Perl 6 language. Nothing else. The Rakudo Star distribution is the Rakudo compiler plus a selection of useful Perl 6 modules, the most recent incarnation of the "Using Perl 6" book, and other software that can be used with the Rakudo compiler to enhance its utility. Rakudo Star is meant for early adopters who wish to explore what's possible with Rakudo Perl 6 and provide feedback on what works, what doesn't, and what else they would like to see included in the distribution.
