On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm happy to announce the October 2011 release of Rakudo Perl #45 "Houston". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see <http://www.parrot.org>). The tarball for this 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 October 2011 release is code named after the Houston Perl Mongers because Houston is a large city in Texas and because Perl 6 could always use more features from Texas. Oh ... and Houston also hosted YAPC::NA 2007 and had a nice Perl 6 hackathon. :-) This compiler release is from the latest development branch of Rakudo. It brings many exciting improvements, but also some regressions, which we are working on. If your primary interest is that your existing code running on Rakudo Perl continues to work, we suggest sticking with the Rakudo Star distribution release for a little longer. If instead you want to play with the latest in Rakudo development - including meta- programming and performance improvements - try this release. Some of the specific changes and improvements occurring with this release include: * Optimizations tuneable from the command line * native types on various operators * Fix start up error when $HOME environment variable isn't set * Fix C3 MRO bug * Start at implementing global matching (m:g//) * Various performance improvements We are still regressed on a few features just as in the previous release. These regressions should be rectified in coming releases. For a more detailed list of changes, see "docs/ChangeLog". 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: Jonathan Worthington, Moritz Lenz, Will "Coke" Coleda, Tadeusz SoĊnierz, Patrick R. Michaud, Jonathan Scott Duff, Carl Masak, Geoffrey Broadwell, mls, snarkyboojum, gfldex, TimToady, TiMBuS, JimmyZ If you would like to contribute, see <http://rakudo.org/how-to-help>, ask on the perl6-compi...@perl.org mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode. The next release of Rakudo (#46) is scheduled for November 17, 2011. A list of the other planned release dates and code names for 2011 is available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file. In general, Rakudo development releases are scheduled to occur soon after each Parrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month. As always ... Have fun! [*] What's the difference between the Rakudo compiler and the Rakudo Star distribution? The Rakudo compiler is just the compiler for the Perl 6 language. Nothing else. The Rakudo Star distribution is the Rakudo compiler plus a selection of useful Perl 6 modules, the most recent incarnation of the "Using Perl 6" book, and other software that can be used with the Rakudo compiler to enchance 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.
