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Rakudo Star 2013.02 released
On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I’m happy to announce the February 2013 release of “Rakudo Star”, a useful and usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the February 2013 release is available from rakudo.org/downloads/star/. A Windows .MSI version of Rakudo star will usually appear in the downloads area shortly after the tarball release.
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 2013.02.1 of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 4.10.0 of the Parrot Virtual Machine, and various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.
Some of the new features added to this release include:
- “Did you mean …” suggestions for symbol-not-found errors
- Compile-time optimization of some cases of junctions in boolean context
- IO::Socket.get now works again with non-ASCII characters
- constant folding for routines marked as ‘is pure’
- natively typed variables and better error reporting in the REPL
- speed up eqv-comparison of Bufs
- warnings for useless use of (some) literals, variables and constant expressions in sink context
This release also contains a range of bug fixes, improvements to error reporting
and better failure modes.
The following features have been deprecated or modified from previous
releases due to changes in the Perl 6 specification, and are being removed
or changed as follows:
- .gist on a type object will return ‘(Typename)’ instead of ‘Typename()’. If you want to get the class name alone, continue to use $obj.^name
- postcircumfix:<[ ]> and postcircumfix:<{ }> will become multi-subs rather than multi-methods. Both at_pos and at_key will remain methods.
- Unary hyper ops currently descend into nested arrays and hashes. This will change to make them equivalent to a one-level map.
- The Str.ucfirst builtin is deprecated; it will be replaced by Str.tc.
- Leading whitespace in rules and under :sigspace will no longer be converted to <.ws> . For existing regexes that expect this conversion, add a <?> in front of leading whitespace to make it meta again.
- The ?-quantifier on captures in regexes currently binds the capture slot to a List containing either zero or one Match objects; i.e., it is equivalent to “** 0..1″. In the future, the ?-quantifier will bind the slot directly to a captured Match or to Nil. Existing code can manage the transition by changing existing ?-quantifiers to use “** 0..1″, which will continue to return a List of matches.
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
- threads and concurrency
- Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints
- interactive readline that understands Unicode
- non-blocking I/O
- much of Synopsis 9
There is an online resource at perl6.org/compilers/features
that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo
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 rakudobug@perl.org.
See perl6.org for links to much more information about Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A draft of a Perl 6 book is available as
The development team thanks all of the contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Star possible. If you would like to contribute, see rakudo.org/how-to-help, ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.org mailing list, or join us on IRC #perl6 on freenode.
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