Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 development release #19 ("Chicago")

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce
the June 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #19 "Chicago".
Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1].
The tarball for the July 2009 release is available from
http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .

Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the
frequent addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we continue
to recommend that people wanting to use or work with Rakudo obtain
the latest source directly from the main repository at github.
More details are available at http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo .

Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release code named
after a Perl Mongers group.  The July 2009 release is named "Chicago",
as chosen by Perl 6 contributor Kyle Hasselbacher.  Kyle has been
doing a truly outstanding job of turning open tickets in the RT queues
into tests for the spectest suite.  Chicago.pm has been the host for
the 2006 and 2008 YAPC::NA conferences and sponsored Perl 6 hackathons
at each conference.

In this release of Rakudo Perl, we've focused our efforts on quality
improvements and bootstrapping.  We now have operators and additional
builtin functions written in Perl 6.

Some of the specific major changes and improvements in this release include:
  
* Rakudo is now passing 11,876 spectests, an increase of 340
  passing tests since the June 2009 release.  With this release
  Rakudo is now passing 68% of the available spectest suite.
 
* Operators can now be written in Perl 6, and this has been done for the
  series operator '...', 'eqv' and the 'leg' operator.

* The multi dispatcher has been refactored extensively, and now handles many
  more edge cases correctly.
 
* User defined traits now follow the specification much more closely; some
  built-in traits are written in Perl 6.

* Improved testing: Null PMC Access exceptions are never considered
  "successful" by the test suite, even if the test was expecting a
  (different) exception to be thrown.

* Improved introspection: you can now get a list of roles composed into a
  class, and a list of attributes.

Since the Perl 6 specification is still in flux, some deprecated features
will be removed from Rakudo. Prominently among those are:

 * '=$handle' is deprecated in favor of '$handle.get' (one line)
   and '$handle.lines' (all lines).

 * 'int $obj' is deprecated in favor of '$obj.Int'.

The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for
making Rakudo Perl possible.  If you would like to contribute,
see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help , ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.org
mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode.

The next release of Rakudo (#20) is scheduled for August 20, 2009.
A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2009 is
available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file.  In general, Rakudo
development releases are scheduled to occur two days after each
Parrot monthly release.  Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month.

Have fun!

References:
[1]  Parrot, http://parrot.org/
