I’m currently at the Yet Another Perl Conference, Europe (YAPC::EU) doing some Git talkin’ and one of the big talks here was by Patrick Michaud (pmichaud) about the very recent release of Rakudo Star, a useful and usable release of Perl 6.

This is a pretty big deal in the Perl community as it’s the first useable Perl 6 implementation out there, which as many of you may know has been in the spec phase for a very long time. Well, today you can start playing in this early Perl 6 and giving feedback to the Perl community.

Also, it’s hosted here at GitHub! The Rakudo team is using GitHub to develop it’s implementation of Perl 6 at rakudo/rakudo

You can read the Rakudo Star release announcement from a few days ago
here. And the announcement on Perl.com here.

To try it out, download the official release from the GitHub downloads page for Star:

http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads

Then run :

$ perl Configure.pl --gen-parrot
$ make
$ sudo make install

That’s it. You can read more about Perl 6 at http://perl6.org – you can also find a book on Perl 6 on GitHub at perl6/book. We’re glad to see the core Perl community using GitHub so much.