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 2015 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the July 2015 release is available from <http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/>. This Rakudo Star release comes with support for the MoarVM backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms). 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 2015.07.2] of the [Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 2015.07 of [MoarVM], plus various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community. [release 2015.07.2]: https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2015.07.md [Rakudo Perl 6 compiler]: http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo [MoarVM]: http://moarvm.org/ Some of the new compiler features added to this release include: * Cool.substr(-rw) and &substr(-rw) now also accept a Range * Added trait "is required" on class attributes * &?ROUTINE and &?BLOCK * &words implemented (to completement .words) * Numeric comparison ops (== > etc) for DateTimes * samewith() now also works in subs * Calling the .clone method with alternate values no longer changes original * .grep and &grep now consume multiple elements for many-param blocks * ENTER phaser now can be used as an r-value Notable changes in modules shipped with Rakudo Star: * Bailador: Add links to documentation * DBIish: Use Postgres environment variables for test configuration * doc: More documentation, mostly for IO-related classes and methods 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: * advanced macros * non-blocking I/O (in progress) * much of Synopsis 9 and 11 There is an online resource at <http://perl6.org/compilers/features> that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo's backends 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 <rakudo...@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. A 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-compi...@perl.org> mailing list, or join us on IRC \#perl6 on freenode.