use Perl

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/

dha writes "Every year the White Camels are presented for service to the Perl community.

If you look at the previous winners, you'll notice that these are mostly unsung heroes, like previous awardee Eric Cholet, the human moderator of so many Perl mailing lists, or Jay Hannah, one of the people running pm.org (if you ever created/maintained a pm group, chances are that Jay walked you through the process).

Some of these people may be well known, like Allison Randal or Randal Schwartz, while others may be complete strangers to at least part of the globe, like Josh McAdams or Jay. Some of them may be extreme Perl hackers who created the original JAPH, but they actually received this award as a recognition for their community contributions to Perl rather than for their programming ability.

That's not to say a great hacker can't receive the award, but you don't have to be one in order to be eligible.

That being said, the nomination process for the 2009 White Camels is now open.

If you think there's someone who deserves a White Camel, this is the time for you to send in your nominations. Send them to whitecamel-suggestions@perl.org, if possible with a subject along the lines of "White Camel Nomination :: $name". Make sure you properly identify the nominee and tell us why you think that's a worthy nomination.

Don't go thinking "nah, somebody else will do it" because: a) everybody else may be thinking the same, and b) you may state your case differently than the next person.

We'll be receiving nominations until June 21, 2009, by midnight, but don't wait up or you'll forget. Do it now!"

I've created some "Beta-test" MSI installers for Strawberry Perl - they're available at http://csjewell.comyr.com/perl/strawberryperlbeta.html for you to test out, hammer on, etc.

If more people do this than just me, July's Strawberry Perl will hopefully be just great!

For production Perl programming environments, you'll still probably want to go to http://strawberryperl.com/ (or to ActiveState, if that works for you) to get your Perl fix on Windows.

Otherwise, let me know of any problems you have!

ehdonhon writes "Planning on staying on campus for YAPC|10? Make sure you reserve your room prior to May 19th. After that date, we no longer have an exclusive hold on the rooms and other events can end up taking our rooms. For more information on YAPC::NA housing, look on the YAPC|10 website at yapc10.org."