Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 development release #17 ("Stockholm")

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce
the May 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #17 "Stockholm".
Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1].
The tarball for the May 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.  This release is named "Stockholm";
Stockholm Perl Mongers will be holding a Perl 6 hackathon on May 29 [3].
Perl 6 developer Carl Mäsak is a member of Stockholm Perl Mongers and
a main author of November [4], Druid [5], proto [6], and other
Perl 6-based packages.  Carl also contributes patches to Rakudo,
and has been stress-testing Rakudo over the past year, submitting
nearly 400 bug reports.

In this release of Rakudo Perl, we've made the following major changes
and improvements:

* Rakudo is now passing 11,342 spectests, an increase of 875
  passing tests since the April 2009 release.  With this release
  Rakudo is now passing 68% of the available spectest suite.

* We now have an updated docs/ROADMAP .

* Errors and stack traces now report the file name and line number
  in the original source code.

* Some custom operators can be defined, and it's possible to
  refer to operators using &infix:<op> syntax.

* We can start to load libraries written in other Parrot languages.

* Regexes now produce a Regex sub.

* More builtin functions and methods have been rewritten in
  Perl 6 and placed as part of the setting.

* There are many additional improvements and features in this release,
  see docs/ChangeLog for a more complete list.

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 (#18) is scheduled for June 18, 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/
[2]  Stockholm.pm, http://sthlm.pm.org/
[3]  Stockholm Perl 6 hackathon, http://vic20.blipp.com/pipermail/kameler/2009-May/000318.html
[4]  November wiki engine, http://github.com/viklund/november/
[5]  Druid, http://github.com/masak/druid/
[6]  Proto, http://github.com/masak/proto/
