Announce: Rakudo Star 2010.12 released

2011-01-28 Thread Patrick R. Michaud

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to
announce the January 2011 release of Rakudo Star, a useful and usable
distribution of Perl 6.  The tarball for the January 2011 release is
available from http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads.

Starting with this January 2011 release, Rakudo Star releases will be
created on a three-month cycle, or as needed in response to important
bug fixes or improvements.  (The Rakudo compiler will continue with
monthly releases.)  The next planned release of Rakudo Star will be 
in April 2011.

Rakudo Star is aimed at early adopters of Perl 6.  We know that
it still has some bugs, it is far slower than it ought to be, and
there are some advanced pieces of the Perl 6 language specification
that aren't implemented yet.  But Rakudo Perl 6 in its current form
is also proving to be viable (and fun) for developing applications
and exploring a great new language.  These Star releases are
intended to make Perl 6 more widely available to programmers, grow
the Perl 6 codebase, and gain additional end-user feedback about the
Perl 6 language and Rakudo's implementation of it.

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language 
(Perl 6) and specific implementations of the language such as
Rakudo Perl.  The January 2011 Star release includes release #37
of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 3.0.0 of the Parrot 
Virtual Machine [2], and various modules, documentation,
and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.

This release of Rakudo Star adds the following features over the
previous Star release:
  * faster subroutine calls (type cache)
  * implemented 'handles Rolename' trait
  * 'use Devel::Trace' debugging pragma
  * improved parsing of keyword boundaries
  * faster .comb

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:
  * nested package definitions
  * binary objects, native types, pack and unpack
  * typed arrays
  * macros
  * state variables
  * threads and concurrency
  * Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints
  * pre and post constraints, and some other phasers
  * interactive readline that understands Unicode
  * backslash escapes in regex [...] character classes
  * non-blocking I/O
  * most of Synopsis 9
  * perl6doc or pod manipulation tools

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.
An updated 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.

[1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
[2] http://parrot.org/


Re: Announce: Rakudo Star 2010.12 released

2010-12-31 Thread Daniel Carrera
Out of curiosity, is it possible to get Rakukdo to talk to C, C++ or Fortran?

On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 8:04 PM, Patrick R. Michaud pmich...@pobox.com wrote:

 On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to
 announce the December 2010 release of Rakudo Star, a useful and usable
 distribution of Perl 6.  The tarball for the December 2010 release is
 available from http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads.

 Rakudo Star is aimed at early adopters of Perl 6.  We know that
 it still has some bugs, it is far slower than it ought to be, and
 there are some advanced pieces of the Perl 6 language specification
 that aren't implemented yet.  But Rakudo Perl 6 in its current form
 is also proving to be viable (and fun) for developing applications
 and exploring a great new language.  These Star releases are
 intended to make Perl 6 more widely available to programmers, grow
 the Perl 6 codebase, and gain additional end-user feedback about the
 Perl 6 language and Rakudo's implementation of it.

 In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language
 (Perl 6) and specific implementations of the language such as
 Rakudo Perl.  The December 2010 Star release includes release #36
 of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 2.11.0 of the Parrot
 Virtual Machine [2], and various modules, documentation,
 and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.

 This release of Rakudo Star adds the following features over the
 previous Star release:
  * New .trans algorithm
  * Configuration improvements
  * More bug fixes

 There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not
 yet handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming
 releases.  Thus, we do not consider Rakudo Star to be a
 Perl 6.0.0 or 1.0 release.  Some of the not-quite-there
 features include:
  * nested package definitions
  * binary objects, native types, pack and unpack
  * typed arrays
  * macros
  * state variables
  * threads and concurrency
  * Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints
  * pre and post constraints, and some other phasers
  * interactive readline that understands Unicode
  * backslash escapes in regex [...] character classes
  * non-blocking I/O
  * most of Synopsis 9
  * perl6doc or pod manipulation tools

 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.
 An updated 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.

 Starting with the January 2011 release, Rakudo Star releases will be
 created on a three-month cycle, or as needed in response to important
 bug fixes or improvements.  The next planned release of Rakudo Star
 will be on January 25, 2011.

 [1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
 [2] http://parrot.org/




-- 
No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email, but a large
number of electrons were severely inconvenienced.


Announce: Rakudo Star 2010.12 released

2010-12-30 Thread Patrick R. Michaud

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to
announce the December 2010 release of Rakudo Star, a useful and usable
distribution of Perl 6.  The tarball for the December 2010 release is
available from http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads.

Rakudo Star is aimed at early adopters of Perl 6.  We know that
it still has some bugs, it is far slower than it ought to be, and
there are some advanced pieces of the Perl 6 language specification
that aren't implemented yet.  But Rakudo Perl 6 in its current form
is also proving to be viable (and fun) for developing applications
and exploring a great new language.  These Star releases are
intended to make Perl 6 more widely available to programmers, grow
the Perl 6 codebase, and gain additional end-user feedback about the
Perl 6 language and Rakudo's implementation of it.

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language 
(Perl 6) and specific implementations of the language such as
Rakudo Perl.  The December 2010 Star release includes release #36
of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 2.11.0 of the Parrot 
Virtual Machine [2], and various modules, documentation,
and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.

This release of Rakudo Star adds the following features over the
previous Star release:
  * New .trans algorithm
  * Configuration improvements
  * More bug fixes

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not
yet handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming
releases.  Thus, we do not consider Rakudo Star to be a
Perl 6.0.0 or 1.0 release.  Some of the not-quite-there
features include:
  * nested package definitions
  * binary objects, native types, pack and unpack
  * typed arrays
  * macros
  * state variables
  * threads and concurrency
  * Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints
  * pre and post constraints, and some other phasers
  * interactive readline that understands Unicode
  * backslash escapes in regex [...] character classes
  * non-blocking I/O
  * most of Synopsis 9
  * perl6doc or pod manipulation tools

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.
An updated 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.

Starting with the January 2011 release, Rakudo Star releases will be
created on a three-month cycle, or as needed in response to important
bug fixes or improvements.  The next planned release of Rakudo Star
will be on January 25, 2011.

[1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
[2] http://parrot.org/