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Re: Rakudo Star - a useful, usable, "early adopter" distributionof Perl 6
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From:
Kiffin Gish
Date:
July 29, 2010 20:37
Subject:
Re: Rakudo Star - a useful, usable, "early adopter" distributionof Perl 6
Message ID:
1280424817.1982.0.camel@laptop
Good stuff, let's celebrate!
On Thu, 2010-07-29 at 07:23 -0500, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to
> announce the July 2010 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
> distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the July 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". "Rakudo Star" is a distribution that includes
> release #31 of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 2.6.0 of
> the Parrot Virtual Machine [2], and various modules, documentation,
> and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community. We
> plan to make Rakudo Star releases on a monthly schedule, with
> occasional special releases in response to important bugfixes or
> changes.
>
> Some of the many cool Perl 6 features that are available in this
> release of Rakudo Star:
> * Perl 6 grammars and regexes
> * formal parameter lists and signatures
> * metaoperators
> * gradual typing
> * a powerful object model, including roles and classes
> * lazy list evaluation
> * multiple dispatch
> * smart matching
> * junctions and autothreading
> * operator overloading (limited forms for now)
> * introspection
> * currying
> * a rich library of builtin operators, functions, and types
> * an interactive read-evaluation-print loop
> * Unicode at the codepoint level
> * resumable exceptions
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Rakudo Star also bundles a number of modules; a partial list of
> the modules provided by this release include:
> * Blizkost
> - enables some Perl 5 modules to be used from within Rakudo Perl 6
> * MiniDBI
> - a simple database interface for Rakudo Perl 6
> * Zavolaj
> - call C library functions from Rakudo Perl 6
> * SVG and SVG::Plot
> - create scalable vector graphics
> * HTTP::Daemon
> - a simple HTTP server
> * XML::Writer
> - generate XML
> * YAML
> - dump Perl 6 objects as YAML
> * Term::ANSIColor
> - color screen output using ANSI escape sequences
> * Test::Mock
> - create mock objects and check what methods were called
> * Math::Model
> - describe and run mathematical models
> * Config::INI
> - parse and write configuration files
> * File::Find
> - find files in a given directory
> * LWP::Simple
> - fetch resources from the web
>
> These are not considered "core Perl 6 modules", and as module
> development for Perl 6 continues to mature, future releases
> of Rakudo Star will likely come bundled with a different set
> of modules. Deprecation policies for bundled modules will be
> created over time, and other Perl 6 distributions may choose
> different sets of modules or policies. More information about
> Perl 6 modules can be found at http://modules.perl6.org/.
>
> Rakudo Star also contains a draft of a Perl 6 book -- see
> <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-compiler@perl.org
> mailing list, or join us on IRC #perl6 on freenode.
>
> Rakudo Star releases are created on a monthly cycle or as needed
> in response to important bug fixes or improvements. The next planned
> release of Rakudo Star will be on August 24, 2010.
>
> [1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
> [2] http://parrot.org/
--
Kiffin Gish <Kiffin.Gish@planet.nl>
Gouda, The Netherlands
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