On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm happy to announce an out-of-schedule release of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler. 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>. This release is a point release in addition to the regular, monthly releases. It contains some of the results of the Perl 6 Patterns hackathon in Oslo. It is intended to be used as the basis for the next Rakudo Star release. The Rakudo developers would like to thank the organizers from Oslo.pm. Some of the specific changes and improvements occurring with this release include: * Support for autovivification. * More robust module precompilation * $.foo, @.foo and %.foo style calls now properly contextualize The 'lib' directory is not in the default search path for modules anymore. Module authors and users can adjust the PERL6LIB environment variable accordingly. 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: Moritz Lenz, Jonathan Worthington, Patrick R. Michaud, Carl Mäsak, Will "Coke" Coleda, Tadeusz Sośnierz, Marcus Ramberg, Timo Paulssen, Felix Herrmann, Geir Amdal, spider-mario, benabik, timotimo, TimToady 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 (#52) is scheduled for May 17, 2012. A list of the other planned release dates and code names for 2012 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. On behalf of the development team, I encourage you to try the new release. have fun, and let us know about your experience. [*] What's the difference between the Rakudo compiler and the Rakudo Star distribution? The Rakudo compiler is a 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 enhance 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.
