    Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 compiler development release #45 ("Houston")

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm happy to announce the
October 2011 release of Rakudo Perl #45 "Houston".  Rakudo is an 
implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see 
<http://www.parrot.org>). The tarball for this release
is available from <http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads>.

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
<http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads>.

The Rakudo Perl compiler follows a monthly release cycle, with each
release named after a Perl Mongers group.  The October 2011 release is
code named after the Houston Perl Mongers because Houston is a large
city in Texas and because Perl 6 could always use more features from 
Texas.  Oh ... and Houston also hosted YAPC::NA 2007 and had a nice Perl 6
hackathon.  :-)

This compiler release is from the latest development branch of Rakudo.
It brings many exciting improvements, but also some regressions, which
we are working on. If your primary interest is that your existing code
running on Rakudo Perl continues to work, we suggest sticking with the
Rakudo Star distribution release for a little longer. If instead you
want to play with the latest in Rakudo development - including meta-
programming and performance improvements - try this release.

Some of the specific changes and improvements occurring with this
release include:

* Optimizations tuneable from the command line
* native types on various operators
* Fix start up error when $HOME environment variable isn't set
* Fix C3 MRO bug
* Start at implementing global matching (m:g//)
* Various performance improvements

We are still regressed on a few features just as in the previous
release. These regressions should be rectified in coming releases.

For a more detailed list of changes, 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, Will "Coke" Coleda, Tadeusz
Sośnierz, Patrick R. Michaud, Jonathan Scott Duff, Carl Masak, Geoffrey
Broadwell, mls, snarkyboojum, gfldex, TimToady, TiMBuS, JimmyZ

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 (#46) is scheduled for November 17, 2011. A
list of the other planned release dates and code names for 2011 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.

As always ...  Have fun!


[*] 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 enchance 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.

