Rakudo Perl 6 development release #18 ("Pittsburgh")

François Perrad francois.perrad at gadz.org
Fri Jun 19 08:57:06 UTC 2009


2009/6/19 Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com>:
>
> On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce
> the June 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #18 "Pittsburgh".
> Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1].
> The tarball for the June 2009 release is available from
> http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .
>

As usual, binaries for Windows are available on
http://parrotwin32.sourceforge.net/ ,
including the latest Parrot release and many other languages.

> Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the
> frequent addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we continue
> to recommend that people wanting to use or work with Rakudo obtain
> the latest source directly from the main repository at github.
> More details are available at http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo .
>
> Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release code named
> after a Perl Mongers group.  This release is named "Pittsburgh", which
> is the host for YAPC|10 (YAPC::NA 2009) [2] and the Parrot Virtual Machine
> Workshop [3].  Pittsburgh.pm has also sponsored hackathons for Rakudo
> Perl as part of the 2008 Pittsburgh Perl Workshop [4].
>
> In this release of Rakudo Perl, we've focused our efforts on refactoring
> many of Rakudo's internals; these refactors improve performance,
> bring us closer to the Perl 6 specification, operate more cleanly
> with Parrot, and provide a stronger foundation for features to be
> implemented in the near future.  Some of the specific major changes
> and improvements in this release include:
>
> * Rakudo is now passing 11,536 spectests, an increase of 194
>  passing tests since the May 2009 release.  With this release
>  Rakudo is now passing 68% of the available spectest suite.
>
> * Method dispatch has been substantially refactored; the new dispatcher
>  is significantly faster and follows the Perl 6 specification more
>  closely.
>
> * Object initialization via the BUILD and CREATE (sub)methods is
>  substantially improved.
>
> * All return values are now type checked (previously only explicit
>  'return' statements would perform type checking).
>
> * String handling is significantly improved: fewer Unicode-related
>  bugs exist, and parsing speed is greatly improved for some programs
>  containing characters in the Latin-1 set.
>
> * The IO .lines and .get methods now follow the specification more closely.
>
> * User-defined operators now also receive some of their associated
>  meta variants.
>
> * The 'is export' trait has been improved; more builtin functions
>  and methods can be written in Perl 6 instead of PIR.
>
> * Many Parrot changes have improved performance and reduced overall
>  memory leaks (although there's still much more improvement needed).
>
> 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-compiler at perl.org
> mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode.
>
> The next release of Rakudo (#19) is scheduled for July 23, 2009.
> A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2009 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!
>
> References:
> [1]  Parrot, http://parrot.org/
> [2]  YAPC|10 http://yapc10.org/yn2009/
> [3]  Parrot Virtual Machine Workshop, http://yapc10.org/yn2009/talk/2045
> [4]  Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, http://pghpw.org/ppw2008/
>
>


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