Rakudo compiler, Release #184 (2025.06) was announced with many improvements and fixes to v6.d and I counted 40 new features for RakuAST in v6.e.PREVIEW.

The following people contributed to this release:

Elizabeth Mattijsen, Geoffrey Broadwell, Patrick Böker, Coleman McFarland, Daniel Green, Stefan Seifert, Will Coleda, ab5tract, Timo Paulssen, Tom Browder, Daniel Sockwell, Jan-Olof Hendig, Leon Timmermans, Richard Hainsworth, habere-et-dispertire, ivanyoung10

If you are interested in trying out RakuAST, a good place to begin is the RakuAST for Early Adopters (5 Part Series) by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Co-Organising

Elizabeth Mattijsen blogged about The Second Raku Core Summit, apparently a productive time was had by all despite transport hassles.

Wendy van Dijk blogged about Co-organising the Raku Core Summit 2025

Top Topics

Patrick Böker guided the creation of a list of top topics for the summit:

• Raku 6.e
• RakuAST
• Querying the AST
• Providing grammars for popular formats
• Speeding up NFAs / Grammars
• Speeding up UTF8 decoding / normalization
• Unicode updates
• RakuDoc for modules
• Debugger
• Documentation
• Varargs in NativeCall
• How to increase Raku Adoption
• Future role of Liz
• Raku Foundation
• Visions of Raku
• Rakudo backends
• Improving our websites

Much of Saturday morning was spent on discussing some of these subjects. But quite some hacking was also involved!

Wayland’s Corner

In the strangely compelling Raku: Both RPG and Guild, Wayland channels Carl Mäsak and invites us to Imagine we’re part of a Magic Guild. (Not a particularly exclusive one…)

Lizmat’s Corner

The seminal Towards a Raku Foundation blog featured in the last weekly made it to the Top 7 Featured DEV Posts of the Week, keeping raku in the spotlight.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #328 is available for your perusal.

New Problem Solving Issues

• We need policies and guidelines for dealing with Gen AI Output in the Ecosystem
• Add my :U $x as complementary feature to use variables :D.
• Towards an AI-powered Raku
• Extend use v6.x statement meaning, and add named arguments

New Pull Requests

• The wrapper scripts in CURI (CompUnit::Repository::Installation) have been revamped to kick the Windows .bat wrappers into shape.
• New andthen/orelse improvements around Promise / await have been submitted for 6.e.

Core Developments

• moarvm-2025.06 was released with updated mimalloc, libuv; offer full path name in debug server, less memory waste, first cut at doc for handling UNICODE data, massive refactoring and cleanup of strings and silenced some warnings.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made sure that coercion doesn’t introduce a container, made Enumeration:D.clone return invocant, made $*PROGRAM-NAME always assignable, use $*PROGRAM instead of $?FILE in ‘use lib’,
• ab5stract removed unnecessary WhateverApplicable
• Patrick Böker fixed the wrapper installation of relocatable installations, the wrapper name in USAGE and raku -v on non-standard macOS.

In RakuAST developments:

• Elizabeth Mattijsen micro-optimized MASTing QAST::Stmt, made sure that $?FILE is a relative path, marked failing tests as TODO, did some maintenance on L10N, updated all files in the bin directory, removed RakuAST::L10N,

Meanwhile on Bluesky

• I hope it makes sense by Simon Proctor.
• Top 7 featured posts on DEV! by CyberTaters.
• Mine has a few more pictures by Wendy van Dijk.
• Timo Paulssen helped to get Rakudo on … the Compiler Explorer website by Wendy van Dijk.

Questions about Raku

• Best way to install Raku with zef without admin password on linux by Bimo

Comments about Raku

• …Claude was if absolutely no help… by polyteley.
• cloc counts lines of code by AIDanail.
• the perl6 guys ended up inventing the new perl (now renamed raku) by Steve Roe.

New Raku Modules

• L10N::Complete by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Monad, Tokenizers, LLM::Chat by apogee.
• Duck::CSV by Brian Duggan.
• Hilite, Air::Plugin::Hilite by Steve Roe.

Updated Raku Modules

• Sparrow6 by Alexey Melezhik.
• L10N, L10N::NL, L10N::EN, L10N::DE, L10N::FR, L10N::HU, L10N::IT, L10N::PT, Commands by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• L10N::CY, L10N::JA by Richard Hainsworth.
• Raylib::Bindings by vushu.
• Noise::Simplex by apogee.
• PDF::Tags by David Warring.
• Text::Diff::Sift4 by Daniel Green.
• Text::Utils, Mi6::Helper by Tom Browder.
• Air, Air::Examples by Steve Roe.
• Pakku by Haytham Elganiny.
• MoarVM::Remote by Raku Community.

Winding down

Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work! Even after week 24 of hopefully only 209.

Meanwhile, still: Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

~librasteve (job sharing)

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