On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I’m happy to announce the February 2015 release of Rakudo Perl 6 #85 “Berlin”. Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Moar Virtual Machine[^1], the Java Virtual Machine and the Parrot Virtual Machine[^2]. The tarball for this release is available from <http://rakudo.org/downloads/rakudo/>.
Please note: This announcement is not for the Rakudo Star distribution[^3] --- it’s announcing a new release of the compiler only. For the latest Rakudo Star release, see <http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/>. As described by pmichaud in a recent blog post: http://pmthium.com/2015/02/suspending-rakudo-parrot/ this is the *last* release of Rakudo that supports Parrot as a backend for the foreseeable future. Whether Parrot support can be restored at some point in the future, really depends on people with tuits making the necessary changes. In that light, I would like to emphasize the last paragraph of said blog post: If there are people that want to work on refactoring Rakudo’s support for Parrot so that it’s more consistent with the other VMs, we can certainly point them in the right direction. For the GLR this will mainly consists of migrating parrot-specific code from Rakudo into NQP’s APIs. For the NSA and NFG work, it will involve developing a lot of new code and feature capabilities that Parrot doesn’t possess. The Rakudo Perl compiler follows a monthly release cycle, with each release named after a Perl Mongers group. This release is named after Berlin.pm for several reasons: + Historically, Berlin has been known to be a divided city. Just over 25 years ago, the miracle of reunification started. Berlin today is a thriving city, still redefining itself. The fact that this release will most likely be the last release supporting Parrot, signifies a division that we hope will be undone in the future. The history of Berlin should be an inspiration for this. + In April 2015, the next Perl QA Hackathon will take place in Berlin. This hackathon will be attended by developers who will be working on both Perl 5 as well as Perl 6. A further sign of reunification. Some of the changes in this release are outlined below: These are only some of the changes in this release. For a more detailed list, see “docs/ChangeLog”. INCOMPATIBLE CHANGES: + On MoarVM, symlinks are now followed. This means that e.g. a given path can have both .l and .d be true, if the symlink points to a directory. This behaviour now matches the behaviour on the Parrot and JVM backend, therefore one could consider this a bug fix, rather than an incompatible change. + Overriding invoke/postcircumfix:<( )> for type coercions (ex. MyType(...)) now passes the function arguments as-is, rather than just passing a Capture containing them. To get the old behavior, simply declare a Capture parameter (|c). + "6;" at unit start is no longer a way to say "no strict;". It was deemed to be a bad meme and huffmannized inappropriately. + The NativeCall module (for incorporating external libraries as Perl 6 subs) is now part of the compiler distribution. To activate it, one must still do a "use NativeCall", but it does *not* have to be installed with panda anymore. If you are a module developer, you can now remove NativeCall as a prerequisite from the meta information of your distribution. Other notable changes: + Coercion syntax now works in signatures: sub foo(Str(Any) $a) { ... } will take Any value as its first positional parameter, and coerce it to Str before making it available in $a. Note that Str(Any) can be shortened to Str(). + "sub MAIN;" (as in, rest of file is the MAIN unit) has been implemented. + Metaop "=" now respects the precedence of the op it is meta-ing. + Added numerical "polymod" method: $seconds.polymod(60,60,24) will give you a list with seconds, minutes, hours, days. + Added rational "base-repeating" method: (1/7).base-repeating(10) will give you a base of "0." and a repeating factor of "142857". In contrast, printf("%0.20f",1/7) would give you 0.14285714285714300000, which is less accurate. + Repeated mixins of the same role and same type are now 10x faster, and use much less memory. Str.trans, tr/// and Str.subst on simple Str, are now about 20x faster. + Many optimizations, improved error messages and bugs fixed (over 200 commits to Rakudo since the 2015.01 release). 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, MoarVM and the specification. The following people contributed to this release: Alexander Moquin, Moritz Lenz, Tobias Leich, Jonathan Worthington, Larry Wall, Will "Coke" Coleda, Timo Paulssen, Rob Hoelz, Andrew Egeler, Paul Cochrane, Stefan Seifert, Brad Gilbert, Mikhail Khorkov, Pepe Schwarz, avuserow, nwc10, skids, mj41, Tux, raydiak, Elizabeth Mattijsen If you would like to contribute, see <http://rakudo.org/how-to-help>, ask on the <[email protected]> mailing list, or ask on IRC \#perl6 on freenode. The next release of Rakudo (#86), is scheduled for 19 March 2015. A list of the other planned release dates and code names for future releases is available in the “docs/release_guide.pod” file. A Rakudo development release typically occurs a few days (often two) after the third Tuesday of each month. The development team appreciates feedback! If you’re using Rakudo, do get back to us. Questions, comments, suggestions for improvements, cool discoveries, incredible hacks, or any other feedback -- get in touch with us through (the above-mentioned) mailing list of IRC channel. Enjoy! [^1]: See <http://moarvm.org/> [^2]: See <http://parrot.org/> [^3]: 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, a module installer, 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. Elizabeth Mattijsen
