Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 compiler development release 2012.09.1 On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm announcing an out-of-schedule release of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler. Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see ). The tarball for this release is available from . Please note: This announcement is not for the Rakudo Star distribution[*] -- it's announcing a new release of the compiler only. For the latest Rakudo Star release, see . This release is a point release in addition to the regular, monthly releases. Rakudo 2012.09 (no .1) required Parrot 4.8.0, which was recently discovered to have some unfortunate regressions in standard input/output buffering for many environments. This interim release restores the compiler back to using Parrot 4.4.0 to allow more time to resolve I/O issues. This also means we revert to 2012.08's version of socket encoding (where sockets all assume utf8 encoding of data), but this reversion is considered of lesser harm than the regressions in standard I/O. Other changes since the 2012.09 release are also included in this point release: - add 'is-prime' and 'expmod' operations - enable smart matching against Signature literals - enable binding to signatures in declarators - add the 'is hidden' and base traits - temporarily remove the ability to change socket encodings (reverts to 2012.08's behavior) Both 2012.09 and 2012.09.1 contain a possibly breaking change from 2012.08: - class Iterable does not inherit from class Cool anymore This is only a small peek at the changes in this release. For a more detailed list, see "docs/ChangeLog". The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Perl possible, as well as those people who worked on Parrot, the Perl 6 test suite and the specification. The following people contributed to this release: Jonathan Worthington, Moritz Lenz, Patrick R. Michaud, Jonathan Scott Duff, Solomon Foster If you would like to contribute, see , ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.org mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode. The next release of Rakudo (#57) is scheduled for October 18, 2012. A list of the other planned release dates and code names for 2012 is available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file. In general, Rakudo development releases are scheduled to occur soon after each Parrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month. [*] What's the difference between the Rakudo compiler and the Rakudo Star distribution? The Rakudo compiler is a compiler for the Perl 6 language. Nothing else. The Rakudo Star distribution is the Rakudo compiler plus a selection of useful Perl 6 modules, the most recent incarnation of the "Using Perl 6" book, and other software that can be used with the Rakudo compiler to enhance its utility. Rakudo Star is meant for early adopters who wish to explore what's possible with Rakudo Perl 6 and provide feedback on what works, what doesn't, and what else they would like to see included in the distribution.