A major step towards releasing the next language level of the Raku Programming Language (tentatively called “6.e”) has been achieved with the 2026.09 release of Rakudo: it makes the new Raku grammar/actions (based on RakuAST) the default when running Raku programs. Love it when a plan comes together!
This concludes (for now) a project that was started in 2020 by Jonathan Worthington, and got major contributions from:
- Vadim Belman
- Brad Gilbert
- Daniel Green
- John Haltiwanger
- Nick Logan
- Elizabeth Mattijsen
- Stefan Seifert
In total about 5000 commits in the Rakudo repository, in about 6.5 years, clocking in at least 2 commits / day on average for that period. An extensive piece of work, now ready to go into production!
A big thanks goes out to Will Coleda for getting this important release out of the door, with plenty of stress and repeated blin runs to get the latest bug reports out of the system before the release.
Anton’s Corner
Anton Antonov published a blog post about their Bulgarian localization of the Raku Programming Language. Which now brings the number of localization to 16: Afrikaans, Bulgarian, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, TaoYuan (Chinese), Ukrainian and Welsh!
Naoum’s Corner
Naoum Hankache (of Raku Guide fame) has published a very nice interactive website that allows you to test your knowledge of the Raku Programming Language: “Raku Koans – The path to enlightenment, learn Raku from syntax to culture through 105 browser-based koans in 16 categories. A good exercise, even for experienced Raku users!
Alexandr’s Corner
Alexandr Zahatski (of Podlite fame) has written a blog post “What an AI agent can verify in the Raku Knowledge Base“, introducing the Raku Knowledge base with an MCP-server for those of you using LLMs such as Claude Code. Very exciting development indeed!
Andrew’s Corner
Andrew Shitov just announced that Raku++ has now reached 100.00% coverage of roast, and that it can now call itself an implementation of the Raku Programming Language! Congratulations are in place! Another very exciting development!
Weeklies
Weekly Challenge #393 is available for your perusal.
New Pull Requests
- Annotate inserted breakpoint instructions with their line number
- RakuAST: treat a WhateverCode operand of a short circuit operator as a value
- Deprecate the legacy frontend with a message
Core Developments
- Nick Logan again has been very busy:
- Fixed repossession issue affecting precompilation of modules that share a core class name.
- Optimized several cases of array/hash element assignments.
- Fixed several issues where code would give different results depending on whether the optimizer was active or not.
- Added CI jobs for Rakudo with the optimizer switched off.
- Fixes for many, many issues that came up in blin runs and other bug reports
- Elizabeth Mattijsen made RakuAST default for compiling core and programs, and also removed all tests for macros and Perl 5 regexes.
- Patrick Böker fixed an issue with empty command line arguments on Windows.
Meanwhile on Mastodon
- Pick up Raku? by Alter Kaker.
- Weighted star score up by GitRanks.
Meanwhile on Hacker News
- Supporting parallel programming by bolangi.
- Famously hard by stackghost.
Meanwhile on Lobsters
- Releasing slangmaker by mempko.
- Clearer for parsing by toastal.
- Their own solution by dutchie.
New Raku Modules
- RakuPM “A teaching-grade Raku package manager” by skyter10086.
- L10N::BG “Bulgarian localization of Raku” by Anton Antonov.
- L10N::ES “Spanish localization of Raku” by Ignacio Martinoli.
- IO::Directory::Watcher “File change events for long running systems” by Simon Proctor.
- Life::Mathematics “Provide Mathematics of Life logic” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
- Math::NIntegrate “Raku package for numerical integration” by Anton Antonov.
Updated Raku Modules
- Rakuast::RakuDoc::Render by Richard Hainsworth.
- Tree::Binary by Simon Proctor.
- Code::Coverable, Code::Coverage, DirHandle, P5getnetbyname, MoarVM::Profile, L10N, L10N::FR, L10N::NL, L10N::EN, L10N::HU, L10N::IT, L10N::JA, L10N::PT, L10N::ZH, L10N::Complete, App::MoarVM::Debug by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
- Subsets::IO, Test::Stream, Grammar::Modelica, Math::Symbolic, Pod::TreeWalker by Nick Logan.
- HTTP::Tinyish by Shoichi Kaji.
- Sparrow6, Sparky::Minimal by Alexey Melezhik.
- LLM::Character, DBIish, MCP::Server, Image::PNG::Portable by Matt Doughty.
- NotoFonts-OT by Tom Browder.
- jmp by Nigel Hamilton.
- Redis by Brian Duggan.
- Inline::Perl5 by Stefan Seifert.
Winding down
Wow, what a week. RakuAST mainstream, Raku++ reaching parity with Rakudo spectest-wise, an LLM Raku Knowledge base interface, and a nice interactive way to check your Raku knowledge, and 2 new Raku localizations! Definitely a week to remember!
Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work! Even after week 88 of hopefully only 209.
Meanwhile, still: Слава Україні! Героям слава!
If you like what I’m doing, donating to the Raku Foundation would mean a great deal to me!
