Rakudo.org

[This notice is going out a bit late; the release was indeed
produced on time, but I was delayed in sending out this notice.
With apologies for the delay... --Pm]

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the January 2010 development release of Rakudo Perl #25 "Minneapolis". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see http://www.parrot.org). The tarball for the January 2010 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .

Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release

We want a Perl 6 book. We want it badly enough to write it ourselves. So that's
what we're doing: writing one.

Changes/additions to the Perl 6 book since the previous release:

• Builtins chapter
  • created this chapter
  • added description of the Complex type
• Roles chapter
  • created this chapter

There have also been some changes to the support scripts and support
documents for producing the book. These include:

• new HTML make target
• updated the release guide

You can download the preliminary PDF version of the book at

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the
December 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #24 "Seoul".
Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine
(see http://www.parrot.org). The tarball for the December 2009 release
is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads

Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the frequent
addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we recommend building Rakudo
from the latest source, available from the main repository at github.

We want a Perl 6 book. We want it badly enough to write it ourselves. So that's
what we're doing: writing one.

You can download the preliminary PDF version of the book at
http://cloud.github.com/downloads/perl6/book/book-2009-11.pdf

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the November 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #23 "Lisbon". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see http://www.parrot.org). The tarball for the November 2009 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads

We want a Perl 6 book. We want it badly enough to write it ourselves. So that's what we're doing: writing one.

We, that is Patrick Michaud (architect of the Rakudo Perl compiler), Jonathan Worthington (prolific contributor to both Rakudo and Parrot), Carl Mäsak (frenetic Rakudo user, and our number one bug finder) and Moritz Lenz (keeper of the Perl 6 test suite, and Perl 6 user and blogger). We are also open to contribution from others - already Jonathan Scott Duff has written an initial preface for us.

Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 development release #22 ("Thousand Oaks")

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the
October 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #22 "Thousand Oaks".
Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine
(see http://www.parrot.org). The tarball for the October 2009 release
is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads

It's been quite a while since I've written any articles about Rakudo's progress, but the delay in articles has been because I've been really focused on code development for a number of things we're going to need quickly for Rakudo Star.

Since I got back from my travels in Asia - actually, as soon as I'd got a good night's sleep after the long flight - I've been busily hacking away on my latest Hague Grant. In fact, I've done rather little else. After a couple of weeks of work - with many late nights debugging - I've finally reached the first major milestone of the grant: the new signature binder has landed.

So what is a signature binder anyway? It's the thing that takes the signature on a block (or some more interesting type of code object, such as a sub or a method) along with the arguments that it was invoked with and - if possible - binds them against the signature, such that the arguments passed end up in the correct variables. It sounds relatively simple, and in some senses it is. However, Perl 6 signatures offer a lot of powerful features, making things rather less trivial.

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce
the September 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #21 "Seattle".
Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1].
The tarball for the September 2009 release is available from
http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .

Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the frequent
addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we recommend building Rakudo
from the latest source, available from the main repository at github.