Rakudo Star Release 2018.10

2018-11-11

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm pleased to announce the October 2018 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable production distribution of Rakudo. 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.

We make a distinction between the language ("Perl 6" or "Raku") and specific implementations of the language such as "Rakudo".

This Star release includes release 2018.10 of the Rakudo compiler, version 2018.10 MoarVM, plus various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the community.

The Rakudo compiler changes since the last Rakudo Star release are now listed in "2018.08.md" and 2018.09.md" under the "rakudo/docs/announce" directory of the source distribution.

This is the first Rakudo Star release that comes with an additional JS backend. See 6pad project at https://perl6.github.io/6pad/ for running Perl 6 code directly in your browser.

Important Rakudo bug fixes are now listed at https://alerts.perl6.org/

Also see Rakudo Star errata at https://perl6.org/downloads/

Deprecation:

  • LWP::Simple is deprecated and will be removed. Please use "HTTP::UserAgent".
  • panda-sub which pointed user to zef now removed.

Notable changes in modules shipped with Rakudo Star:

  • openssl: Bump version 0.1.21.
  • tap-harness6: Bump version to 0.0.4 for coloring
  • zef: version 0.5.3

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, including documentation, example code, tutorials, presentations, reference materials, design documents, and other supporting resources. 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.