Rakudo Star Release 2017.07

2017-07-24

A useful and usable production distribution of Perl 6

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm pleased to announce the July 2017 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable production distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the July 2017 release is available from https://rakudo.perl6.org/downloads/star/.

Binaries for macOS and Windows (64 bit) are also available.

This is the eighth post-Christmas (production) release of Rakudo Star and implements Perl v6.c. It comes with support for the MoarVM backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms).

IMPORTANT: "panda" is to be removed very shortly since it is deprecated. Please use "zef" instead.

Currently, Star is on a quarterly release cycle and 2017.10 (October) will follow later this year.

Please note that this release of Rakudo Star is not fully functional with the JVM backend from the Rakudo compiler. Please use the MoarVM backend only.

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 2017.07 of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 2017.07 MoarVM, plus various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.

Note this Star release contains NQP version 2017.07-9-gc0abee7 rather than the release NQP 2017.07 in order to fix the --ll-exception command line flag.

The Rakudo compiler changes since the last Rakudo Star release of 2017.01 are now listed in "2017.05.md", "2017.06.md" and "2017.07.md" under the "rakudo/docs/announce" directory of the source distribution.

Notable changes in modules shipped with Rakudo Star:

  • DBIish: Doc and CI updates
  • doc: Too many to list. p6doc fixed.
  • grammar-debugger: Works again now.
  • p6-io-string: New dep for doc.
  • p6-native-resources: Removed since deprecated and not used by linenoise.
  • panda: Officially deprecate panda in favour of zef.
  • perl6-Test-When: New dep for perl6-pod-to-bigpage.
  • perl6-lwp-simple: Fix breakage due to rakudo encoding refactor.
  • tap-harness6: Replaces deprecated tap-harness6-prove6.
  • zef: Too many to list.

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
  • non-blocking I/O (in progress)
  • some bits of Synopsis 9 and 11

There is an online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo's backends 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 [email protected].

See https://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, presentations, reference materials, design documents, and other supporting resources. Some Perl 6 tutorials are available under the "docs" directory 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 [email protected] mailing list, or join us on IRC #perl6 on freenode.