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Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 development release #24 ("Seoul")
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On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the
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December 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #24 "Seoul".
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Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine
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(see http://www.parrot.org). The tarball for the December 2009 release
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is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads
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Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the frequent
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addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we recommend building Rakudo
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from the latest source, available 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 after
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a Perl Mongers group. The December 2009 release is code named "Seoul" for
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Seoul.pm, who hosted Jonathan so well recently, and because they have a cake
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Shortly after the October 2009 (#22) release, the Rakudo team began a new
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branch of Rakudo development ("ng") that refactors the grammar to much more
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closely align with STD.pm as well as update some core features that have been
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difficult to achieve in the master branch [1, 2]. Most of our effort for the
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past month has been in this new branch, but as of the release date the new
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version had not sufficiently progressed to be the release copy. We expect to
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have the new version in place in the January 2010 release, but may elect
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to have an interim release from the new branch before then.
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This release of Rakudo requires Parrot 1.9.0. One must still
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perform "make install" in the Rakudo directory before the "perl6"
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executable will run anywhere other than the Rakudo build directory.
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For the latest information on building and using Rakudo Perl, see the
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readme file section titled "Building and invoking Rakudo".
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Some of the specific changes and improvements occuring with this
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* Rakudo is now passing 32,192 spectests, a "decrease" of 561 passing
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tests since the November 2009 release. We pass fewer tests now
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because specification changes caused many obsolete (but passing)
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tests to be removed from the suite -- from 38,318 in November to
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37,376 now. The percentage of passing tests has increased, from
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85.5% in November to 86.1% today.
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* More improvements to the Rat type and related math functions to
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remain aligned with the specification.
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The Perl 6 language specification is still in flux. Please take note of the
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following changes, which might affect your existing programs. In the next
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release of Rakudo, the deprecated features will likely be gone.
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* The root of the object hierarchy has been changed from 'Object' to 'Mu'.
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The type 'Object' goes away.
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* The term 'undef' is gone. You can replace it with other constructs,
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- 'Nil' is undefined in item context, and the empty list in list context
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- 'Mu' is the most general undefined value which does not flatten in list
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- as a smart matching target, you can replace '$obj ~~ undef'
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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 (#25) is scheduled for January 21, 2010.
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A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2010 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] http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/39779
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[2] http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/39874
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docs/announce/2009-12
