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Rakudo *

Summary

Rakudo is an implementation of the Perl 6 specification for the Parrot virtual machine, in rapid development. Rakudo Star is the first production release of Rakudo.

Owners

  • email: <gerd@fedoraproject.org>, <cwickert@fedoraproject.org>

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 14
  • Last updated: 2010-07-06
  • Percentage of completion: 60%
    • 2009-08-11: put a Rakudo package with stripped shared objects in Fedora 11 and 12
    • 2010-06-15: Parrot 2.5.0 "Cheops" released
    • 2010-06-17: Rakudo 2010.06 (#30 "Kiew") released
    • 2010-06-19: Patrick Michaud announced "Rakudo *" for July 29

Detailed Description

Perl 6 is a major revision to the Perl programming language, which introduces elements of many modern and historical languages. There are currently multiple implementation projects of Perl 6 underway, the most actively developed one is Rakudo, which is based on the Parrot virtual machine. Rakudo Star holds a series of complete Perl 6 environments for example:

  • Some random libraries
  • Documentation

Benefit to Fedora

Providing Perl 6 support makes Fedora an attractive platform for developers. Rakudo will enable developers to write new applications or port existing ones. By offering Perl 6 at the current state Fedora once again proves it's foundations Features and First

Scope

  • Package reviews
  • Continuous updates each month

How To Test

  • Test that rakudo builds on the parrot RPMs provided in Fedora.
  • Use the test suite included in Rakudo to verify that it actually works:
    • make test will run a suite of tests, designed to make sure that the Rakudo compiler is basically working and that it's capable of running a simple test harness.
    • make spectest will import relevant portions of the official Perl 6 test suite from the Pugs repository and run all of the tests that are currently known to pass.

User Experience

Rakudo will enable developers to write new applications or port existing ones to Perl 6. Although Perl 6 is still in development and no official release date has been set, the specification is feature complete and mature. Rakudo has released 19 stable releases so far. Both parrot and rakudo do one stable release each month and developers will get them easily without hassle on a regular schedule.

Dependencies

  • Parrot >= 2.6: Parrot 2.6.0 will be released on July 20, will be in Fedora >= 12)
  • Rakudo: Review

(Note that the base parrot rpm is required at runtime.)

Contingency Plan

None necessary, revert to previous release behaviour.

Documentation

Release Notes

Fedora comes with Rakudo Perl, an implementation of the Perl 6 specification based on the Parrot virtual machine, which enables developers to write new applications or port existing ones to Perl 6. To install rakudo, use the Add/Remove Software tool or run: 

su -c 'yum install rakudo'

For information of command line options run: 

man perl6
man rakudo

Comments and Discussion


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