Recently in Perl 6 Development Category

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to announce the July 2010 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the July 2010 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads.

Rakudo Star is aimed at "early adopters" of Perl 6. We know that it still has some bugs, it is far slower than it ought to be, and there are some advanced pieces of the Perl 6 language specification that aren't implemented yet. But Rakudo Perl 6 in its current form is also proving to be viable (and fun) for developing applications and exploring a great new language. These "Star" releases are intended to make Perl 6 more widely available to programmers, grow the Perl 6 codebase, and gain additional end-user feedback about the Perl 6 language and Rakudo's implementation of it.

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language ("Perl 6") and specific implementations of the language such as "Rakudo Perl". "Rakudo Star" is a distribution that includes release #31 of the Rakudo Perl 6 "compiler, version 2.6.0 of the Parrot Virtual Machine, and various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community. We plan to make Rakudo Star releases on a monthly schedule, with occasional special releases in response to important bugfixes or changes.

Some of the many cool Perl 6 features that are available in this release of Rakudo Star:

• Perl 6 grammars and regexes
• formal parameter lists and signatures
• metaoperators
• gradual typing
• a powerful object model, including roles and classes
• lazy list evaluation
• multiple dispatch
• smart matching
• junctions and autothreading
• operator overloading (limited forms for now)
• introspection
• currying
• a rich library of builtin operators, functions, and types
• an interactive read-evaluation-print loop
• Unicode at the codepoint level
• resumable exceptions

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases. Thus, we do not consider Rakudo Star to be a "Perl 6.0.0" or "1.0" release.

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.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. Rakudo Star also contains a draft of a Perl 6 book -- see 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 perl6-compiler@perl.org mailing list, or join us on IRC #perl6 on freenode.

Rakudo Star releases are created on a monthly cycle or as needed in response to important bug fixes or improvements. The next planned release of Rakudo Star will be on August 24, 2010.

Editor's notes

For questions, contact Perl Foundation Public Relations at pr@perlfoundation.org.

Perl

Perl is a dynamic programming language created by Larry Wall and first released in 1987. Perl borrows features from a variety of other languages including C, shell scripting (sh), AWK, sed and Lisp. It is distributed with practically every version of Unix available and runs on a huge number of platforms, as diverse as Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, z/OS, os400, QNX and Symbian.

The Perl Foundation

The Perl Foundation is dedicated to the advancement of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code. It is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization incorporated in Holland, Michigan, USA in 2000.

It is with great pleasure to announce the approval of the latest Ian Hague grant for Perl 6 development, entitled 'Traits, Introspection and More Dispatch Work For Rakudo.' This grant goes to Jonathan Worthington, who has already successfully finished one Hague grant. The grant manager for this grant will be Patrick Michaud, the lead architect of Rakudo Perl 6, the Perl 6 implementation effort on top of the Parrot virtual machine.

We thank Jonathan for his grant application and we look forward to its success. Jonathan will keep the Perl community informed of his progress on this grant work through the Rakudo.org blog and in his own use.perl.org journal.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the call for feedback regarding this grant application. Your feedback is essential in the decision process regarding Hague grants.

Coming off the completion of his first Hague grant, Jonathan Worthington has submitted a request for a new Ian Hague Perl 6 development grant for his proposal "Traits, Introspection and More Dispatch Work For Rakudo". A part of the Hague grant process is that submitted grant requests may, as opted by the submitter, be provided for public and community comment.

Jonathan's grant request is included here, below. Any interested Perl community members may provide their comments regarding this grant request here.

In late November 2007 Jonathan Worthington submitted a Hague Perl 6 Grant proposal entitled 'Rakudo Dispatch and Role Enhancements'. I am pleased to announce that Jonathan submitted his final Hague grant report yesterday (included below the fold), and it was approved and accepted by chromatic, the grant manager for the grant. This successfully completes this Hague Grant for Perl 6 development. We thank Jonathan for his great work on this grant and his efforts in advancing the goal of a completed Perl 6 implementation.

(The following message was written by Jonathan Leto, TPF's organizer-in-chief for GSoC 2009. TPF gives its warmest thanks to Jonathan for all his work on GSoC 2009.)

I have the extreme pleasure to announce that the Google Summer of Code
2009 has officially started and The Perl Foundation will be mentoring
9 students this year in a variety of projects. A breakdown of each
student project and mentor with links to the project abstract can be
found at [1]. If you would like to keep up with recent updates, then
subscribe to this RSS feed [2]. If you would like to get a little more
involved, come join us in #soc-help on irc.perl.org or join the
tpf-gsoc-students list [3].

[1] http://leto.net/dukeleto.pl/2009/04/google-announces-nine-students-in-gsoc2009-with-the-perl-fou.html
[2] http://leto.net/dukeleto.pl/atom.xml
[3] http://groups.google.com/group/tpf-gsoc-students

Thanks to everyone involved, including students with projects that
were not accepted. We had a limited number of spots and some very good
applications could not be accepted. With a bit more spit and polish
some would be a great fit for a TPF grant. Thank you to everyone who
applied, and if you did not get accepted this year, you can still
implement your project and become part of the community, without
getting paid. I promise, we don't bite.

Stay tuned for further updates.

On November 20, 2008, Jonathan Worthington submitted an Ian Hague Perl 6 development grant request entitled Rakudo Dispatch and Role Enhancements.

Public comments regarding this grant request were extremely positive. These, in addition to consultation with Jesse Vincent (Perl 6 project manager) and Patrick Michaud (Rakudo project lead), allow The Perl Foundation to enthusiastically accept this grant request. chromatic has agreed to volunteer as the grant manager for this grant, and TPF gladly accepts his help with this. He is both diligent and exceptionally knowledgeable in the subject area and will do an excellent job of helping TPF evaluate Jonathan's progress.

We look forward to Jonathan's success with this grant work over the next few months and are excited about how this work will help advance Perl 6 implementation.

Jonathan Worthington has submitted a request for an Ian Hague Perl 6 development grant for his proposal "Rakudo Dispatch and Role Enhancement". A part of the Hague grant process is that submitted grant requests may, as opted by the submitter, be provided for public and community comment.

Jonathan's grant request is included here, below. Any interested Perl community members may provide their comments regarding this grant request here.