Rakudo Perl development release #15 (“Oslo”)

Originally published on 20 March 2009 by Patrick Michaud.

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I’m pleased to announce the March 2009 development release of Rakudo #15 “Oslo”. Rakudo is an implementation of Raku on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1]. The tarball for the March 2009 release is available.

However, because of the rapid pace of Rakudo development and addition of new features, we still recommend that people wanting to use or work with Rakudo obtain the latest version directly from the main repository at github – more on this in a bit.

Rakudo follows a monthly release cycle, with each release code named after a Perl Mongers group. This release is named “Oslo” in honor of the organizers of the 2009 Nordic Perl Workshop [2], April 16-17, 2009.
The 2009 Nordic Perl Workshop will have a special focus on Raku, Rakudo, and Parrot, including Raku tutorials and hackathons after the conference itself.

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.

Rakudo now uses git for its version control system, hosted at https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo. The README file there is kept up-to-date with the latest instructions for obtaining and building Rakudo.

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

Rakudo is now passing 7273 spectests. This is an increase of 197 passing tests since the February 2009 release.
The eval construct now understands lexical variables from an outer scope.
More of the builtin functions (“settings”) are being written in Raku.
Rakudo supports the “R” (reverse) metaoperator.
Parsing of if, unless, while, until, etc. statements after blocks now works correctly.
The Q quote operator is now implemented, along with several adverbial forms. In particular, the Q:PIR form allows inline PIR to be included in Raku code.
Multi-method dispatch now works with inheritance also.

The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Perl possible. The next release of Rakudo (#16) is scheduled for April 23, 2009.