Perl 6.c (Christmas) Rakudo Star coming soon

Are you waiting for a Rakudo * Christmas Release? Or an MSI installer for windows? Here's the story so far:

  1. There were some bugs in the 2015.12 compiler release (Sorry!) that we thought it would be nice to fix in time for the R* release.
  2. This would involve a point release of 2015.12.1 to fix just those bugs.
  3. Work continued as normal on the main dev branch of rakudo, including some awesome things that are not strictly backwards compatible - whoops, we had meant to get this all sorted out at the same time as the release.
  4. Work was done on a way to integrate the spec-breaking changes and the safe bug fixes into a single compiler release (This will probably be the case going forward; "use" will declare which compiler code path you're using, e.g. "use v6.c")
  5. We realized we might need to change where we store the 6.c spec to make it easier to test.
  6. Realize that getting the bug fix release out is actually more important right now than getting the multi-versioned release out. Much work done on that front by niner, but...
  7. January is really busy for everyone on the core team, esp. after pushing very hard to get December's release settled.


I'm hoping that by the end of the first week of February, we'll have a compiler release with the fixes we need, an R* release out for Perl 6.c (Christmas), an MSI to go with it, and then for the March release, we'll see the introduction of a some development track features (available with a use statement, and that won't impact your 6.c compliant code) that will let you try out some 6.d (Divali) preview code.

Thanks for your patience; in the meantime, please consider supporting the
TPF's Perl 6 Core Development fund with a few bucks so we can keep the incoming grant requests funded; it will definitely be helpful to have someone be able to work on Rakudo as their $DAYJOB, not just as a sideline.

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