Fwd: [Israel.pm] Fwd: Rakudo Star - a useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6

[Shlomi Fish]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: [Israel.pm] Fwd: Rakudo
Star - a useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of 	Perl 6
Date:
Thursday 29 July 2010, 16:49:30
From: Gabor Szabo <szabgab at gmail.com>
To:
Perl in Israel <perl at perl.org.il>, news at perl.org.il

---------- Forwarded
message ----------
From: Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com>
Date: Thu,
Jul 29, 2010 at 3:23 PM
Subject: Rakudo Star - a useful, usable, "early
adopter" distribution of Perl 6


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 at 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/
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Shlomi
Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Optimising Code for Speed -
http://shlom.in/optimise

God considered inflicting XSLT as the tenth plague
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