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Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 development release #18 ("Pittsburgh")
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On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce
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the June 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #18 "Pittsburgh".
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Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1].
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The tarball for the June 2009 release is available from
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http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .
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Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the
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frequent addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we continue
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to recommend that people wanting to use or work with Rakudo obtain
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the latest source directly from the main repository at github.
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More details are available at http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo .
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Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release code named
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after a Perl Mongers group. This release is named "Pittsburgh", which
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is the host for YAPC|10 (YAPC::NA 2009) [2] and the Parrot Virtual Machine
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Workshop [3]. Pittsburgh.pm has also sponsored hackathons for Rakudo
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Perl as part of the 2008 Pittsburgh Perl Workshop [4].
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In this release of Rakudo Perl, we've focused our efforts on refactoring
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many of Rakudo's internals; these refactors improve performance,
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bring us closer to the Perl 6 specification, operate more cleanly
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with Parrot, and provide a stronger foundation for features to be
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implemented in the near future. Some of the specific major changes
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and improvements in this release include:
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* Rakudo is now passing 11,536 spectests, an increase of 194
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passing tests since the May 2009 release. With this release
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Rakudo is now passing 68% of the available spectest suite.
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* Method dispatch has been substantially refactored; the new dispatcher
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is significantly faster and follows the Perl 6 specification more
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* Object initialization via the BUILD and CREATE (sub)methods is
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substantially improved.
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* All return values are now type checked (previously only explicit
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'return' statements would perform type checking).
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* String handling is significantly improved: fewer Unicode-related
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bugs exist, and parsing speed is greatly improved for some programs
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containing characters in the Latin-1 set.
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* The IO .lines and .get methods now follow the specification more closely.
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* User-defined operators now also receive some of their associated
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* The 'is export' trait has been improved; more builtin functions
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and methods can be written in Perl 6 instead of PIR.
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* Many Parrot changes have improved performance and reduced overall
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memory leaks (although there's still much more improvement needed).
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The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for
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making Rakudo Perl possible. If you would like to contribute,
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see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help , ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.org
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mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode.
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The next release of Rakudo (#19) is scheduled for July 23, 2009.
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A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2009 is
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available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file. In general, Rakudo
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development releases are scheduled to occur two days after each
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Parrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month.
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[1] Parrot, http://parrot.org/
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[2] YAPC|10 http://yapc10.org/yn2009/
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[3] Parrot Virtual Machine Workshop, http://yapc10.org/yn2009/talk/2045
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[4] Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, http://pghpw.org/ppw2008/
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