Announce: Niecza Perl 6 v10

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    Announce: Niecza Perl 6 v10

This is the tenth release of Niecza Perl 6, as usual scheduled on
the last Monday of the month.

You can obtain a build of Niecza from [1].  This build contains a
working compiler as a set of .exe and .dll files suitable for use with
Mono or Microsoft .NET.  If you wish to follow latest developments,
you can obtain the source from [2]; however, you will still need a
binary for bootstrapping, so you gain nothing from a "source is
better" perspective.

Niecza is a Perl 6 compiler project studying questions about the
efficient implementability of Perl 6 features.  It currently targets
the Common Language Runtime; both Mono and Microsoft .NET are known to
work.  On Windows, Cygwin is required for source builds only; see the
README for details.


    List of changes



[Major features]

CLR interoperation is now fairly well supported!  You can create
objects, call methods, get and set fields and properties, create
delegates, etc from Perl 6 code.  See examples/ for usage ideas.
(Examples by Martin Berends)

The Mono.Posix dependency has been relaxed from load time to run
time, meaning .NET support is back if you don't use file tests.



[Minor new features]

\qq[] syntax is now implemented.

qp|| now returns a path object.

New Test.pm6 methods succeeds_ok and fails_ok (and eval_ variants) to
catch warnings.  (Design by flussence)

@foo? and %foo? in signatures are now correctly supported.

Many more trig functions now implemented. (Solomon Foster)

Standard grammar has been updated, in particular bringing the new
concept of regex separators; x ** y is now spelled x+ % y.  Do
not expect other forms of % and %% to work just yet.



[Selected bug fixes]

sqrt now returns the correct value for arguments with a negative
imaginary part.  Also sqrt(0) returns Num not Complex now.



[Other]

docs/compiler.pod is more current.  (Martin Berends)

Prototyping has begun on Perl 5 interoperation.  (Pawe=C5=82 Murias)


    Getting involved

Contact sorear in irc.freenode.net #perl6 or via the sender address of
this mailing.  Also check out the TODO file; whether you want to work
on stuff on it, or have cool ideas to add to it, both are good.

    Future directions

I have an active branch (started this month) to unify compile-time and
run-time metamodel representations, using serialization to bridge the
gap.  It doesn't work yet, but when it does it will enable many
improvements, most importantly real support for BEGIN and roles.

[1] https://github.com/downloads/sorear/niecza/niecza-10.zip
[2] https://github.com/sorear/niecza

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