On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm happy to announce the August 2010 release of Rakudo Perl #33 "Milan". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see <http://www.parrot.org>). The tarball for the September 2010 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 September 2010 release is code named "Milan", because the release manager happens to like the name :-) Some of the specific changes and improvements occurring with this release include: * The specification for temporal objects (DateTime, Date, Instant and Duration) is now completely implemented in Rakudo * Several performance improvements were implemented, most notably in slurp() and reverse() functions * The series operator has been refactored, and updated to the current specification * Enumeration objects now conform much closer to the current specification * 'now' and 'time' are now terms (and not functions anymore). This means you can now write 'time - 1' and do what you mean, but 'time()' does not work anymore For a more detailed list of changes see "docs/ChangeLog". Deprecation notice: * Currently True and False evaluate as '1' and '0' in string context. The specification has changed, and in the next release they will evaluate to 'Bool::True' and 'Bool::False' in string context. To get the old behaviour, use ~+True or ~+False. 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: Moritz Lenz, Patrick R. Michaud, Carl Masak, Patrick Abi Salloum, Solomon Foster, Kodi Arfer, chromatic, Kyle Hasselbacher, Bruce Gray, Martin Berends, Stephane Payrard, Tyler Curtis, Shlomi Fish, Nick Wellnhofer, Nuno Carvalho, Tadeusz SoĊnierz, TiMBuS, NotFound, mathw 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 (#34) is scheduled for October 21, 2010. A list of the other planned release dates and code names for 2010 is available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file. In general, Rakudo development releases are scheduled to occur two days after each Parrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month. Have fun!
