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    Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 compiler development release #43 ("Beijing")

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm happy to announce the
July 2011 release of Rakudo Perl #43 "Beijing".  Rakudo is an 
implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see 
<http://www.parrot.org>). The tarball for the July 2011 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 July 2011 release is code named
"Beijing" after the host of the Beijing Perl Workshop 2011, which featured
several Perl 6 related talks.

This will be the last compiler release made from the current "master"
branch of Rakudo.  For the past several months, Rakudo compiler
development has primarily occurred in the "nom" branch of the
Rakudo repository (over 1200 commits since the 2011.05 release).
Shortly after this release, the "nom" branch will become the new
"master" branch and will be the source for future releases,
including the 2011.08 release.  We expect there will be several
releases in the near future -- watch http://rakudo.org/ for
details.

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

* Fix bug in exponentation of negative numbers
* Fix build on systems with little RAM

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:

Moritz Lenz, Patrick R. Michaud, atrodo, Solomon Foster, bacek and others.

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.

Rakudo has traditionally released two days after each Parrot
monthly release.  Because the new version of the compiler has
additional dependencies beyond Parrot, starting in August 2011 
we will make releases sometime in the week following each monthly
Parrot release.  (Parrot releases occur on the third Tuesday of 
each month.) Thus the next regular release of Rakudo will occur 
sometime before August 23, 2011.  We also expect to have additional
"pre-release" versions of Rakudo and Rakudo Star prior to that date.

A list of the other planned release dates and code names for 2011
is available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file.