Rakudo Star - a useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6
Thu, 29-Jul-2010 by
Karen Pauley
edit post
<, version 2.6.0 of the [Parrot Virtual Machine](http://parrot.org/), 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 <docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf> 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](http://www.perl.org)
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](http://www.perlfoundation.org/)
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.
]]>
Comments (2)
FYI, the link for the, "Perl" heading is broken.
Thanks for letting me know.
