    Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 compiler development release #44 ("Riga")

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm happy to announce the
September 2011 release of Rakudo Perl #44 "Riga".  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 September 2011 release is code named
after the host city of the YAPC::EU 2011 conference, which included a
very successful Perl 6 track and hackathon.

This is the first compiler release 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:

* numerous speedups
* Int, Num and Str are now far more lightweight
* int/num as attributes are stored compactly in the object body
* meta objects are now much easier to modify
* a Pod parser capable of attaching documentation to objects
* --doc command line option producing formatted documentation
* much more robust handling of infinite list
* basic LoL (List of Lists) support
* :U and :D type modifiers
* improved handling of BEGIN phasers
* protos and multis now conform to the new spec
* improved enum support
* basic 'constant' declarator
* .WHAT and friends as macros
* support for .gist
* run() has been renamed to shell() to conform to current spec
* hyper methods now descend into nested data structures
* basic safe mode (through --seting=SAFE)
* many bug fixes in parametric roles
* a custom BUILD does not suppress default values
* undeclared attributes detected and reported at compile time
* basic support for native int/num types on lexical variables
* a new regex engine

We briefly regress on a few features since the previous release.
Most notably, new regex engine has not implemented proto regexes
yet, and only integer-based enums are available.

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, Patrick R. Michaud, Tadeusz Sośnierz, Will
"Coke" Coleda, Solomon Foster, Kodi Arfer, Carl Mäsak, Martin Berends, kboga,
Jonathan Scott Duff, Michael Schröder, JD Horelick, TimToady, Arne Skjærholt,
Kyle Hasselbacher, flussence, Dave Whipp, William Orr, Jimmy Zhuo, Andy
Lester, Patrick Abi Salloum, Fitz Elliott, snarkyboojum, Ruslan Zakirov,
Vasily Chekalkin, kristof, Stefan O'Rear, Geoff Broadwell, Martin
Kjeldsen, supernovus, Timothy Totten, Felix Herrmann, Jarrod, mikehh,
Michael Stapelberg, baest, Erik Johansen, bbkr

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 (#45) is scheduled for October 20, 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 two days after each
Parrot monthly release.  Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month.

Have fun!
