Today, Elizabeth Mattijsen announced the formation of The Raku Foundation in a blog post A Year Later: a TRF!

Please Register Your Interest

It is going to take a little time for the Executive Board to put in place the registration of Raku community members and procedures consistent with the legal requirements in the Netherlands so that members will be able to democratically participate in the decision-making.

Raku contributors (of all kinds) will shortly be invited to join the membership. You are most welcome and kindly encouraged to register your interest at https://raku.foundation.

Since the formation of The Raku Foundation is such a big step forward for the community, I would like to take the opportunity to reproduce here some of lizmat’s words first published a year ago that outline the need for this and started the process:

Towards a Raku Foundation (18 June 2025)

Drifting Apart: Some History

The Raku Programming Language was originally started as the next version of the Perl Programming Language (then at version 5.6.0, now at 5.40.2). Unfortunately the implementation of this next version took much longer than expected. In the eyes of many Perl users the new version also changed the character of the language, which caused a rift in the Perl community.

When in late 2015 the initial release of what was then called “Perl6” came out, the rift only deepened: not wanting to relinquish the “Perl6” nomer was felt by many in the Perl community as name squatting. In late 2019 the name squatting issue was resolved by changing the name of “Perl6” to the “Raku Programming Language”.

Project Representation

Open source projects that exist beyond the scope of their original developer need to have a way to be represented, and usually also a way to finance vital project infrastructure: technical infrastructure (such as providing websites and testing services), as well as organisational infrastructure (such as regular user events, Code of Conduct -both online and at events-, and project course decisions) and developmental support (such as grants).

Because of Raku’s historical roots, this has been taken care of (or was sponsored by) Yet Another Society (or YAS, to most better known as “TPF” or “The Perl Foundation”). After the name change of the language, YAS acquired a new alias: “The Perl and Raku Foundation” (or short: TPRF). But it has always felt like a remnant of historical connection that Raku had with Perl, rather than something that was a natural result of the developing situation.

Keeping an Open Source foundation running requires volunteers willing to spend a sizeable amount of their free time on foundation matters. And it requires a source of funds to keep the foundation in working order.

Towards a Raku Foundation

Historically YAS has received funding from many sources. Initially to support just Perl, later this was separated into support for Perl 5 and what was to be Perl 6. Over the years it has become more difficult for YAS to obtain funding. And has not received much funding for what is now Raku: there are probably many reasons for that, one of them being that Raku as a separate target for funding is not very visible on the foundation’s website.

Now, more than five years after the name change, it feels like a good time for the Raku community to be standing on its own feet, without support by YAS. After several weeks of discussing this with several people involved in YAS and the Raku Community, I hereby announce the intent to set up a completely separate Raku Foundation, based in Europe, but global in reach.

This would allow YAS to be fully focussing on the one programming language that instigated the creation of the foundation: Perl. And it would allow the Raku Community to be served by a foundation that is solely dedicated to the Raku Programming Language.

See the original post for more.

Weekly Challenge

Weekly Challenge #378 is available for your scrutiny.

Raku Tips ‘n Tricks

Last week we looked at the . (dot) and ! (exclamation) twigils and their use in Raku class attribute has declarations.

Something easily overlooked is the similarity between self. and $. method call syntax. In fact $. is just another way of writing self. .

Consider this example, self. is used as the invocant to call the accessor for $.name and to call the meta-method .^name (the caret denotes that we are asking something about the class, in this case, the class name):

class Person {
    has $.name;

    method type-check {
        "{self.name} is {self.^name}"
    }
}

class Celebrity is Person {
    method name { callsame.uc }
}

my $a = Celebrity.new(name => 'Larry');
say $a.name;         # LARRY
say $a.type-check;   # LARRY is Celebrity

In the example callsame.uc is saying “if you are a Celebrity, then apply the upper case .uc method to .name“. Since we are using self, and Celebrity inherits from Person then the child object method is called first and callsame then dispatches to the parent method. A typical method override.

In Raku we can rewrite the same code, using the $. syntax like this:

class Person {
    has $.name;

    method type-check { "$.name is $.^name" }
}

class Celebrity is Person {
    method name { callsame.uc }
}

my $a = Celebrity.new(name => 'Larry');
say $a.name;         # LARRY
say $a.type-check;   # LARRY is Celebrity

Note:

• the $.name variant is more natural to access the attribute
• like self.name – the inheritance and dispatcher logic plays nicely
• $. is a good syntax for non-attributed method calls too
• $. (and $!) play nice with string interpolation too, no extra curly {} linenoise needed

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

Comments about Raku

• …Raku [2], and Rust [3] let you assign arbitrary meanings by gucci-on-fleek
• I prefer a concise language btw: say (0, 1, *+* … *)[10] by Steve Roe
• Raku.org 选择HtmxRaku.org 选择Htmx 零基础AI编程指南 by hn.aimaker.dev

New Modules

• OpenMPT::Bindings by Sasha Abbott

Updated Modules

• Blin by Core Mongers
• Ecosystem::Archive::Update, SBOM::Raku, Ecosystem, IRC::Channel::Log, Map::Match, nano, Ecosystem::Cache, Hash::Agnostic, Map::Agnostic, vars, App::IRC::Log, Zef::Configuration, JSON::Fast::Hyper, MoarVM::Profile, SBOM::CycloneDX, PURL by Elizabeth Mattijsen
• Test::When by Various Artistes
• MongoDB::Fast by Zer0-Tolerance
• CSS::Properties, FontConfig, CSS::Writer, LibXML, CSS::TagSet, CSS::Grammar, Font::FreeType, CSS::Module, Base64::Native by David Warring
• JSON::Fast by Timo Paulssen
• Rakuast::RakuDoc::Render by Richard Hainsworth
• FFmpegProgressBar, CSS::Minifier by Sasha Abbott
• YAMLScript by Ingy döt Net
• WebDriver2 by zjmarlow
• Actionable, Contact by Steve Roe

Winding down

Massive achievement by Liz and the newly appointed Executive Board. I enjoyed helping out with the new site and (since I am the author of the Air module) it nice to hear that Air and the HARC Stack framework is living up to the design goal:

And the most fun part: the whole website (from my point of view) is all just Raku code!

Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work! Even after week 72 of hopefully only 209.

~librasteve