Rakudo Star Release 2018.04

2018-05-07

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm pleased to announce the April 2018 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable production distribution of Rakudo Perl 6. The tarball for this release is available from https://rakudo.perl6.org/downloads/star/.

Binaries for macOS and Windows (64 bit) are also available at the same location.

This is a 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). Currently, Star is on a quarterly release cycle.

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 6".

This Star release includes release 2018.04.1 of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 2018.04.1 MoarVM, plus various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.

The Rakudo compiler changes since the last Rakudo Star release of 2017.10 are now listed in "2018.02.md", "2018.03.md", "2018.04.md" and 2018.04.1.md" under the "rakudo/docs/announce" directory of the source distribution.

Important Rakudo bug fixes are now listed at Deprecation:

+ "panda" has been removed from releases after 2017.10 since it is deprecated.  Please use "zef".
+ LWP::Simple is deprecated and will be removed. Please use "HTTP::UserAgent".

Notable changes in modules shipped with Rakudo Star:

+ datetime-parse: Update asctime parsing
+ doc: Too many to list including jjmerelo TPF Grant Work.
+ http-useragent: Pre-allocate a buffer when getting content
+ json\_fast: Unescape fixes.
+ jsonrpc: LWP::Simple replaced with HTTP::UserAgent.
+ svg-plot: Fix xy-line plot closing over some variables it shouldn't.
+ zef: version 0.3.1 (includes fix for space in home directory)

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
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.