"Rakudo Star - a useful, usable, 'early adopter's distribution of Perl 6" MIT 9/14 E51 7pm

Bill Ricker bill.n1vux at gmail.com
Wed Sep 8 21:19:42 EDT 2010


"Rakudo Star - a useful, usable, 'early adopter's distribution of Perl 6"

 "Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated" -- Mark Twain

Curious what the Perl community has been up to lately? Come see Perl
6's recent preview release.

Since July, Perl Mongers groups around the world are doing demo nights
to build and exercise Rakudo Star.  Boston.PM's turn is September
14th, MIT  E51-376 7:30pm (refreshments in hallway at 7). {This is the
night before BLU's PGP night, second Tuesday is as late as it gets
this month.}  We'll install it and show what it can do. We may discuss
what more the final release candidate will do, and if  enough
non-regulars turn up, we can discuss what's in 5.12 that's not in the
5.8.4 or older that's still on many commercial Unix systems.

RSVP for count encouraged (so our kind refreshments sponsors CIDC
know) but not required,
to me bill.n1vux at gmail.com or Boston-PM list. (If you have favorite
snippets of Perl6 code to share, send them too)

Directions - http://boston.pm.org/kwiki/index.cgi?MITDirections

-- 
Bill Ricker, Boston.pm facilitator http://boston.pm.org/kwiki/
bill.n1vux at gmail.com
[*] http://perldoc.perl.org/perlhist.html

====================


Announce: Rakudo Star - a useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6
Submitted by pmichaud on Thu, 07/29/2010 - 05:18

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 [1 http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo],
version 2.6.0 of the Parrot Virtual Machine [2 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. ...
[read more]  http://rakudo.org/node/75 announcement
(1) http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
(2) http://parrot.org/


More information about the gnhlug-discuss mailing list