A useful and usable production distribution of Perl 6

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm pleased to
announce the October 2017 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and
usable production distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for this release
is available from https://rakudo.perl6.org/downloads/star/.

Binaries for macOS and Windows (64 bit) are also available at the same location.

This is a post-Christmas (production) release of Rakudo Star and
implements Perl v6.c. It comes with support for the MoarVM backend
(all module tests pass on supported platforms). Currently, Star is on
a quarterly release cycle.

IMPORTANT: "panda" has been removed from this release since it is
deprecated. Please use "zef" instead.

Please note that this release of Rakudo Star is not fully functional
with the JVM backend from the Rakudo compiler. Please use the MoarVM
backend only.

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 2017.10 of the Rakudo Perl 6
compiler, version 2017.10 MoarVM, plus various modules, documentation,
and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.

The Rakudo compiler changes since the last Rakudo Star release of
2017.07 are now listed in "2017.08.md", "2017.09.md", and "2017.10.md"
under the "rakudo/docs/announce" directory of the source distribution.

Notable changes in modules shipped with Rakudo Star:

+ DBIish: Newer version (doesn't work with 2017.01 anymore)
+ Test-META: New. also dependencies (JSON-Class, JSON-Marshal,
JSON-Name, JSON-Unmarshal and META6)
+ doc: Too many to list. p6doc-index merged into p6doc and index built
on first run.
+ p6-Template-Mustache: Fixed on Windows.
+ panda: Removed. Stub added to warn about this.
+ perl6-datetime-format: New (heavily used in ecosystem)
+ perl6-file-which: Fixed tests on Windows
+ tap-harness6: Many fixes.
+ zef: New version with many fixes
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 (now works for sockets and process)
some bits 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 https://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about Perl
6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, presentations,
reference materials, design documents, and other supporting resources.
Some Perl 6 tutorials are available under the "docs" directory 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.

-- 
4096R/EA75174B Steve Mynott <steve.myn...@gmail.com>

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