Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 development release #27 ("Copenhagen")
Nuno 'smash' Carvalho
On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the
March 2010 development release of Rakudo Perl #27 "Copenhagen".
Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine
(see http://www.parrot.org). The tarball for the March 2010 release
is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .
Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release named
after a Perl Mongers group. The March 2010 release is code named
"Copenhagen" for Copenhagen.pm, hosts of the Perl 6 Copenhagen
Hackathon [1], which took place in connection with the Open Source Days
Conference. The main goal of the hackathon was to raise some awareness
around Perl 6, and to give everyone a chance to get their hands-on with
Perl 6.
The Copenhagen hackathon helped nail down a number of issues regarding
module loading. During these days we also saw a heightened activity on
the channel, in the Perl 6 and Rakudo repositories, and in the number of
passing tests. All this was contributed by people both on location and
elsewhere. The RT queue peaked at 725 new/open tickets, and then started
on a downward trend. Apart from the great steps forward in productivity,
it was the first time some of the core Perl 6 contributors had a chance
to meet.
Some of the specific changes and improvements occuring with this
release include:
* Numerous updates to trigonometric functions and the Rat class
* Basic s/// and s[...] = '...' implemented
* use improved and need/import implemented, with some basic support
for versioned modules and lexical importation
* Grammars work again and now include support for regexes taking
parameters and proto-regexes
* Series operator now has basic support for the current Spec.
* User defined operators working again
* Support, though with caveats, for !, R, X and Z meta-operators
* Performance improvements for invocation and hash creation
* Various parsing bugs fixed
* Variables initialized to Any by default now, not Mu
* ROADMAP updates
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. If you would like to contribute,
see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help , ask on the perl6-c...@perl.org
mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode.
The next release of Rakudo (#28) is scheduled for April 22, 2010.
A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2010 is
available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file. In general, Rakudo
development releases are scheduled to occur two days after each
Parrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month.
Have fun!