Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 development release #19 ("Chicago")

[François Perrad]

2009/7/23 Moritz Lenz <moritz at casella.faui2k3.org>:
> On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce
> the July 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #19 "Chicago".
> Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1].
> The tarball for the July 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.  The July 2009 release is named "Chicago",
> as chosen by Perl 6 contributor Kyle Hasselbacher.  Kyle has been
> doing a truly outstanding job of turning open tickets in the RT queues
> into tests for the spectest suite.  Chicago.pm has been the host for
> the 2006 and 2008 YAPC::NA conferences and sponsored Perl 6 hackathons
> at each conference.
>
> In this release of Rakudo Perl, we've focused our efforts on quality
> improvements and bootstrapping.  We now have operators and additional
> builtin functions written in Perl 6.
>
> Some of the specific major changes and improvements in this release include:
>
> * Rakudo is now passing 11,876 spectests, an increase of 340
>  passing tests since the June 2009 release.  With this release
>  Rakudo is now passing 68% of the available spectest suite.
>
> * Operators can now be written in Perl 6, and this has been done for the
>  series operator '...', 'eqv' and the 'leg' operator.
>
> * The multi dispatcher has been refactored extensively, and now handles many
>  more edge cases correctly.
>
> * User defined traits now follow the specification much more closely; some
>  built-in traits are written in Perl 6.
>
> * Improved testing: Null PMC Access exceptions are never considered
>  "successful" by the test suite, even if the test was expecting a
>  (different) exception to be thrown.
>
> * Improved introspection: you can now get a list of roles composed into a
>  class, and a list of attributes.
>
> Since the Perl 6 specification is still in flux, some deprecated features
> will be removed from Rakudo. Prominently among those are:
>
>  * '=$handle' is deprecated in favor of '$handle.get' (one line)
>   and '$handle.lines' (all lines).
>
>  * 'int $obj' is deprecated in favor of '$obj.Int'.
>
> 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 (#20) is scheduled for August 20, 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/
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