Breaking News

NixOS release of Rakudo 2025.12 is live by habere-et-dispertire

State of the Onion 2025

Many thanks to all authors for the wonderful posts in this year’s Raku Advent. I hope that you enjoyed reading them as much as I did. Particular thanks to Elizabeth Mattijsen for her Raku 2025 Review, which I refer to as State of the Onion 2025 in homage to the Larry Wall annual reports of old.

Rakudo compiler, Release #188 (2025.12)

Kudos to the Core Dev team for the release of 2025.12 in time for Christmas. Here are the release notes…

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #354 is available for your enjoyment.

Raku Tips ‘n Tricks

One great thing about writing this newsletter is that I learn something new every time. This week, inspired by the recents improvements to the -MSIL compiler flag, is a deeper dive into the Raku internals than usual…

use MoarVM::SIL;

if SIL() -> $SIL {
    LEAVE $SIL.exit;

    # do testing, or just show the report:
    say $SIL.report;
}

Run this code and you get the Spesh Inline Log report that the Raku MOARVM virtual machine creates as it specialises code – placing basic blocks (BBs) inline to speed up execution, like this:

Spesh Inline Log Report of Process #53115 (2025-12-29T17:56:23Z)
Executing: scum.raku

Successful inlines
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 2x empty-string BB(5, 90 bytes) -> BB(9)
    int-zero BB(6, 88 bytes) -> BB(11)
    write_uint32_at BB(7, 80 bytes) -> add-internal BB(178)
    signature BB(8, 46 bytes) -> sort_dispatchees BB(4)
    types BB(10, 46 bytes) -> sort_dispatchees BB(4)
    write_uint8 BB(10, 80 bytes) -> add-internal BB(178)
    definednesses BB(11, 46 bytes) -> sort_dispatchees BB(4)
    has-captures BB(14, 62 bytes) -> MATCH BB(140)
    onlyname BB(17, 46 bytes) -> MATCH BB(140)
    nominalizable BB(24, 18 bytes) -> !find_wrappee BB(80)
    CAPS BB(24, 46 bytes) -> MATCH BB(140)
    coercive BB(31, 18 bytes) -> BB(143)
...

Your contribution is welcome, please make a gist and share via the raku channel IRC or Discord.

Questions About Raku

• Does Raku have a counterpart to the Camel Book by Profoundly Nerdy

Comments About Raku

• Liz wrote a very long blog with a lot of information by Wendy van Dijk
• Programming languages that change how you think about programmin by Profoundly Nerdy
• The start of JITDUMP support for MoarVM by timo
• Go, Raku, and Swift all worked. R didn’t. by nicholaides
• love of complexity, which led to the disaster that was Raku by clay_shirky

New Raku Modules

• Graph::RandomMaze, Jupyter::Converter by Anton Antonov

Updated Raku Modules

• GnomeTools by Marcel Timmerman
• Sparky by Alexey Melezhik
• Raylib::Bindings, Raygui::Bindings by zef:vushu
• Chess by github:grondilu
• String::Utils by Elizabeth Mattijsen
• YAMLScript by Ingy döt Net
• Air, Air::Examples by Steve Roe
• CSS::Writer, CSS::Specification, HTML::Canvas, CSS::Font::Resources, CSS::Module by David Warring
• App::Backup, Terminal::Gauge by Francis Grizzly Smit
• Text::MiscUtils, Terminal::Widgets by Geoffrey Broadwell
• Math::NumberTheory, Graph, Markdown::Grammar, Data::Translators by Anton Antonov
• AI::Gator, Terminal::UI, App::samaki by Brian Duggan

Winding down

On, 2025.12 – particularly noteworthy are the upgrade to Unicode 17 and the support for NativeCall varargs. Very nice!

This is the last of 2025. I hope that the year has been good to you. Despite our polarised world, I take some solace that we can all gather around and work together on our -Ofun project.

Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work! Even after week 49 of hopefully only 209.

Meanwhile, still: Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

~librasteve