Elizabeth Mattijsen

2026.28/29/30 Thank you!

After having done the Rakudo Weekly for a year, Steve Roe indicated that they needed a break from doing the Rakudo Weekly, and from Raku more generally. I would like to thank Steve for their work on the Rakudo Weekly and the Raku Advent Calendar, for the (re-)design of the raku.org and raku.foundation websites, and for the many modules they’ve added to the Raku ecosystem.

This also means that yours truly will be taking over doing the Rakudo Weekly again, at least until someone else will stand up to do this. It isn’t that hard to do, really. So please leave a comment if you’re interested in taking over this important and well liked community service!

Here we go for a packed 3-week Rakudo Weekly!

Foundation’s Corner

In the blog post Governance and The Raku Foundation the Executive Board of the Raku Foundation describes their plans on forming a Supervisory Board, thematic working groups (such as for the already existing Documentation, Infrastructure and Marketing working groups, and a new CRA working group), and more formal committees (such as the already existing Raku Steering Council, Community Affairs Team, and the new CVE Numbering Authority).

And on the note of the Cyber Resiliency Act, the EU Commission has just published new guidance to support timely Cyber Resilience Act implementation, a must read if you care about CRA.

Please support the Raku Foundation financially: all donations are welcome, however small or large they may be! and if you want to keep up-to-date on Raku Foundation developments, make sure you register your interest!

Andrew’s Playground

Andrew Shitov has been flying a lot under the Raku radar the past years (due to Covid and war), but has come back with a vengeance. So they deserve a Playground, rather than a Corner!

First of all, they completed the Complete Raku Course grant, now visible at course.raku.org! Andrew, being a prolific writer about the Raku Programming Language, also made all of their books available in an online format, such as:

But that’s not all: after writing a book about creating a compiler, they decided to create a Raku compiler in C++, called Raku++ (/r/rakulang comments). If you’re interested in finding out about the “how”, check out Raku++: The Long Read!

Building on Raku++ Andrew also implemented raku.online, an interactive browser-based playground for Raku introduced in the Raku in a Browser blog post.

To top it all off (at least for now), they started a series of blog posts highlighting unique features of the Raku Programming Language, with the first installment: Raku: a Language Where 0.1 + 0.2 is 0.3.

So, lot’s of kudos to Andrew!

Fernando’s Corner

Andrew Shitov was not the only one creating an online Raku experience! Fernando Correa de Oliveira also created one, using the Rakudo compiler in the background: Raku Playground! Although this allows one to play with Raku online, this does not actually run in the browser, so an internet connection is needed.

Tim’s Corner

Tim Nelson has suggested there is a need for an (additional) web site for the Raku Community, tentatively called “involvement.raku.org”. They’ve made a mock-up of it and are inviting you to comment on the concept (and to checkout inspiration from earlier blog posts: Pathways of Entry and Involvement and Troupes).

Anton’s Corner

Anton Antonov wrote a blog post about recent developments regarding the Jacobian Conjecture and used Raku to create another counter-example in Jacobian conjecture counterexample by LLM.

John’s Corner

John Haltiwanger has also been flying under the Raku radar the past months, but has been working on the Raku Intellij plugin. This has resulted in a 2026.2-beta.4 release in which we see the return of the entire (passing) test suite, and many other improvements with the highlighter and the text formatter. And crucially, the ability to actually open .rakumod files!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #384 is available for your perusal (as are Weekly Challenges #382 and #383).

New Problem Solving Issues

New Pull Requests

Core Developments

Too many developments in the past 3 weeks, especially in RakuAST to provide a good overview for. The good news is that there is now a Rakudo 2026.07 release with the RakuAST approaching parity with the legacy backend, thanks to the work of Nick Logan using data from ecosystem module failures when running with RakuAST activated.

One nice feature that wasn’t really mentioned in the Rakudo 2026.07 announcement, were the general GDB plugin improvements for low-level (core) debugging, contributed by Timo Paulssen. Exciting stuff!

Developments since the 2026.07 release:

  • Daniel Green changed the native library used in MoarVM for converting doubles to strings to Ryu to Żmij, which is faster and requires no post-processing.

Meanwhile on Mastodon

Meanwhile on the mailing list

Questions about Raku

New Raku Modules

  • JSON::RepositoryEvent “Representation of a repository event” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
  • Qwiratry–Location–HTTP “HTTP and HTTPS location backend for Qwiratry” by Tim Nelson.
  • RepositoryEvent “Simplified interface for repository events” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
  • Air::Plugin::Donate “Stripe donation panel plugin for the Air web framework” by Steve Roe.
  • Geo::Valhalla “Raku NativeCall bindings to the Valhalla routing engine” by Brian Duggan.
  • Termbox2 “Raku NativeCall bindings to the termbox2 library” by Arne Sommer.
  • Qwiratry::Test “Reusable conformance (“contract”) test kit for Qwiratry Format and Location plugins.” by Tim Nelson.
  • Qwiratry::Format::JSON “JSON format backend for Qwiratry using JSON::Fast” by Tim Nelson.
  • Qwiratry::Format::YAML “YAML format backend for Qwiratry using YAMLish” by Tim Nelson.
  • Qwiratry::Format::XML “XML format backend for Qwiratry using XML” by Tim Nelson.
  • WWW::XAI “Provides API access to the xAI console” by Anton Antonov.

Updated Raku Modules

Winding down

Wow, 3 weeks packed with big developments: some very nice, and some not so nice.

Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work! Even after week 79 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!

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