This is Rakudo, a Raku compiler for the MoarVM and JVM.
Rakudo is Copyright © 2008-2020, The Perl Foundation. Rakudo is distributed under the terms of the Artistic License 2.0. For more details, see the full text of the license in the file LICENSE.
This directory contains only the Rakudo compiler itself; it does not contain any of the modules, documentation, or other items that would normally come with a full Raku distribution. If you're after more than just the bare compiler, please download the latest Rakudo Star package.
Rakudo is currently the most developed implementation of the Raku language; though there have been other partial implementations in the past. See the compilers page on the website for more. Rakudo has multiple backends: MoarVM and JVM. Note that each backend has a slightly different set of features.
Recent changes and feature additions are documented in the docs/ChangeLog
text file.
To receive important notifications from the core developer team, please subscribe to the p6lert service using the RSS feed, twitter, or the p6lert commandline script.
See the INSTALL.txt file for detailed prerequisites and build and
installation instructions.
The general process for building is running perl Configure.pl with
the desired configuration options (common options listed below), and
then running make or make install. Optionally, you may run
make spectest to test your build on Roast,
the Official Raku test suite. To update the test suite, run
make spectest_update.
Installation of Rakudo simply requires building and running make install.
Note that this step is necessary for running Rakudo from outside the build
directory. But don't worry, it installs locally by default, so you don't need
any administrator privileges for carrying out this step.
To automatically download, build, and install a fresh MoarVM and NQP, run:
$ perl Configure.pl --gen-moar --gen-nqp --backends=moar
Please be aware, that this will install MoarVM and NQP into your given
--prefix before Configure.pl exits.
Alternatively, feel free to git clone https://github.com/Raku/nqp and https://github.com/MoarVM/MoarVM manually and install them individually.
Configuration flags can be passed to MoarVM's Configure.pl using the
--moar-option flag. For example, if you wish to use Clang when GCC is the
default compiler selected for your OS, use the --compiler flag:
$ perl Configure.pl --gen-moar --moar-option='--compiler=clang' \
--gen-nqp --backends=moar
If the compiler you want to use isn't known by MoarVM or you have multiple
versions of the same compiler installed, the --cc flag can be used to pass its
exact binary:
$ perl Configure.pl --gen-moar --moar-option='--cc=egcc' \
--gen-nqp --backends=moar
Custom optimization and debugging levels may also be passed through:
$ perl Configure.pl --gen-moar --moar-option='--optimize=0 --debug=3' \
--gen-nqp --backends=moar
For more information on how MoarVM can be configured, view MoarVM's Configure.pl.
Note that to run Rakudo on JVM, JDK 1.8 must be installed. To automatically download, build, and install a fresh NQP, run:
$ perl Configure.pl --gen-nqp --backends=jvm
If you get a java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space error building
rakudo on the JVM, you may need to modify your NQP runner to limit memory
use. e.g. edit the nqp-j / nqp-j.bat executable (found wherever you installed to, or in the
install/bin directory) to include -Xms500m -Xmx3g as options passed to java.
Alternatively, you can set JAVA_OPTS env var; e.g.
export JAVA_OPTS="-Xmx51200000000"
Please be aware, that this will install NQP into your given --prefix
before Configure.pl exits.
Alternatively, feel free to git clone https://github.com/Raku/nqp manually and install it individually.
By supplying combinations of backends to the --backends flag, you
can get two or three backends built in the same prefix. The first
backend you supply in the list is the one that gets the perl6 name
as a symlink, and all backends are installed separately as
perl6-m or perl6-j for Rakudo on
MoarVM, or JVM respectively.
The format for the --backends flag is:
$ perl Configure.pl --backends=moar,jvm
$ perl Configure.pl --backends=ALL
The roast test suite is installed as the t/spec directory
under your rakudo directory. If your installed rakudo
source directory doesn't have t/spec installed, then
you can clone it like this:
cd $YOUR_RAKUDO_SRCDIR
git clone https://github.com/perl6/roast.git t/spec
Note the rakudo code includes an entry in its .gitignore file
so git will ignore any content under t/spec.
Now you can run tests in the rakudo directory.
Run the full spectest:
$ make spectest # <== takes a LONG time!!
To run a single test, one must use make because of the tooling required to
run the spectests. For example:
$ make t/spec/S03-operators/comparison.t
Run all tests in one S* directory with a sh script. One example:
$ cat run-tests.sh
#!/bin/sh
# specify the desired directory:
D='t/spec/S26-documentation'
# collect the individual files
F=$(ls $D/*t)
# and run them
for f in $F
do
echo "Testing file '$f'"
make $f
done
echo "All tests in dir '$D' have been run."
That can be written as a one-liner:
for f in $(ls t/spec/S26-documentation/*t); do make "$f"; done
There are several mailing lists, IRC channels, and wikis available with help for Raku and Rakudo. Figuring out the right one to use is often the biggest battle. Here are some rough guidelines:
The central hub for Raku information is raku.org. This is always a good starting point.
If you have a question about Raku syntax or the right way to approach a problem using Raku, you probably want the “[email protected]” mailing list or the irc.freenode.net/#raku IRC channel. The perl6-users list is primarily for the people who want to use Raku to write programs, so newbie questions are welcomed there. Newbie questions are also welcome on the #raku channel; the Rakudo and Raku development teams tend to hang out there and are generally glad to help. You can follow @raku_news and on Twitter, there's a Raku news aggregator at Planet Perl 6.
Questions about NQP can also be posted to the #raku IRC channel. For questions about MoarVM, you can join #moarvm on freenode.
If you have a patch that fixes a bug or adds a new feature, please create a pull request using github's pull request infrastructure.
See our contribution guidelines for more information.
If you would like simple history and tab completion in the raku executable, you need to install the Linenoise module. The recommended way to install Linenoise is via zef:
$ zef install Linenoise
An alternative is to use a third-party program such as rlwrap. Documentation on rlwrap can be found here.
See CREDITS for the many people that have contributed to the development of the Rakudo compiler.