Stefan Seifert reported on the completion of their RakuAST grant (/r/rakulang comments), describing to an extent all of the nooks and crannies of the Raku Programming Language that needed to be handled to get all of the Raku tests passing in RakuAST.

If I had to name the single hardest part of the project, it’s certainly timing or sequencing. Raku is not an easy language to compile. A lot of code is already run during compilation. … cases like BEGIN blocks or statements, constant declarations and trait applications (which again, are really just compile time called subs with funny names).

This code that is run during compilation may reference variables from scopes that may not even exist yet (because we’re still compiling it) or subroutines that haven’t been defined. Traits especially modify meta objects (e.g. the class, function or parameter itself) which are not even fully defined at that point.

Kudos for the gargantuan task that has been done by Stefan! Now that task becomes making Rakudo compile itself using RakuAST (aka the “bootstrap-rakuast” branch) and make that mainstream, hopefully for the next compiler release!

Rakudo Compiler Release

Will Coleda has produced the fourth release of the Rakudo compiler for the Raku Programming Language in 2025: 2025.04. This release fixes some issues with producing object hashes, error message improvements, and again an enormous amount of work on RakuAST.

Binary packages will become available shortly (although it looks like some Linux distros will need a .point release), as well as updates to Rakudo Star, if they are not already. Kudos to all involved!

Fernando’s Corner

Fernando Correa de Oliveira has gone one step further in “Introducing MCP: A Protocol for Modular AI Assistants and Raku’s Potential“. MCP is an open and evolving protocol (see modelcontextprotocol.io) that defines how large language models (LLMs) can understand and interact with structured external capabilities. Exciting stuff!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #318 is available for your perusal.

Core Developments

A quiet week in preparation for the 2025.04 release.

Comments about Raku

• Code of neat examples by Anton Antonov.
• Looking forward to the conference by BabylonByBoobies.
• A rich pedigree by imglorp.
• Really nice and clear by Steve Roe.
• It’s fun! by reddit_clone.
• Welcome to the CLI calculator club! by Steve Roe.
• The things that make them better by chat-lu.

New Raku Modules

• RKDS “System for deploying directories using ERK templates” by Ulisus Bortoletti.
• Glob::Grammar “Grammar for the Glob language” by Tim Nelson.
• Class::Loader::Dynamic “Dynamically create classes with the same name as the modules” by Tim Nelson.
• WWW::YouTube “Getting metadata and transcripts of YouTube videos” by Anton Antonov.

Updated Raku Modules

• Math::NumberTheory, LLM::Prompts, Lingua::NumericWordForms, LLM::Containerization by Anton Antonov.
• App::Crag by Steve Roe.
• ERK by Ulisus Bortoletti.
• TOP by Tim Nelson.
• HarfBuzz, HTML::Canvas, HTML::Canvas::To::PDF, FontConfig, Text::FriBidi, Cairo by David Warring.
• Mi6::Helper, FontFactory::Type1, PDF::Document by Tom Browder.
• YAMLScript by Ingy döt Net.
• Gnome::Gtk4 by Marcel Timmerman.

Winding down

Some deeply needed rest and recreation, turned into recovering from a very heavy cold. But will most likely be able to continue to produce Rakudo Weekly News episodes.

Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work! Even after week 13 of hopefully only 209.

Meanwhile, still: Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

If you like what I’m doing, committing to a small sponsorship would mean a great deal!