Rakudo Star Release 2020.01

2020-02-24

On behalf of the Rakudo and Raku development teams, I'm pleased to announce the January 2020 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable production distribution of Rakudo. The tarball for this release is available from https://rakudo.org/downloads/star/.

This release of Rakudo Star implements Raku v6.d. It comes with support for the MoarVM backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms). Currently, Rakudo Star is on a quarterly release cycle.

Please note that this release of Rakudo Star is not fully functional with the JVM backend from the Rakudo compiler. Please use the MoarVM backend only.

We make a distinction between the language "Raku" and specific implementations of the language such as "Rakudo".

This Star release includes release 2020.01 of the Rakudo compiler, and version 2020.01 of MoarVM. Additionally, it includes various community modules, and the Raku documentation.

The Rakudo compiler changes since the last Rakudo Star release can be found in rakudo/docs/announce. Specifically, in:

  • 2019.07.md
  • 2019.07.1.md
  • 2019.11.md
  • 2020.01.md

Also see the Rakudo Star errata at https://raku.org/downloads/

Changes

Added

  • Perl 6 has been renamed to Raku, and this is the first Rakudo Star release containing raku as executable.

Changed

  • The Linenoise community module has been dropped in favour of Readline. This also got LibraryCheck included, as this is a dependency for Readline.

Removed

  • Support for Windows and MacOS binaries has been (temporarily) removed. We are eagerly looking for more people to help us out in getting quality releases for additional platforms!

More information

There is an online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo's backends and other Raku implementations.

In many places we've tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the programmer that a given feature isn't implemented, but there are many that we've missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are welcomed at https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/issues

See https://raku.org/ for links to much more information, including documentation, example code, tutorials, presentations, reference materials, design documents, and other supporting resources. Tutorials are available under the "docs" directory in the release tarball.

The development team thanks all of the contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Star possible. If you would like to contribute, see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help, ask on the [email protected] mailing list, or join us on IRC #raku on freenode.