The Raku programming language first appeared as Perl 6 in December 2015, and was renamed in October of 2019.
While it remains part of the Perl family, compatibility with Perl was not a goal, although a compatibility mode is part of the specification. The three primary methods of communication used in the continued development of the language are the IRC channel on Libera Chat, a set of mailing lists on the Perl Foundation's servers, and the Git source code repository at GitHub.
According to Larry Wall, the primary designer, the major goal in separating Raku from Perl was the removal of historical warts. During the course of its development, it was decided that Perl 6 would not have backward compatibility with the existing Perl codebase, which means that some code that was correctly interpreted by a Perl 5 compiler would not be accepted by a Perl 6 compiler. Given that backward compatibility is a common goal of new versions of software, the distinction between Perl 6 and previous versions of the language became significant enough that it was decided to rename it.
Nevertheless, there was an intent to "keep Raku Perl," so Raku remains a Perl programming language. In large part, the changes were designed to normalize the language, so that it would be easier for both novice and expert programmers to understand.
The Rakudo implementation targets a number of virtual machines, including the Java Virtual Machine, JavaScript, and MoarVM, the latter of which is a virtual machine built especially for Rakudo and the NQP Compiler Toolchain. A layer between Raku and the virtual machines is known as Not Quite Perl 6 (NQP), which implements Raku rules for parsing Raku. However, Rakudo has not been designated as an official Raku implementation.
Raku was influenced by Perl, Ruby, Smalltalk, Haskell, and JavaScript.
The focus of this part of our guide is on the programming language known as Raku. Online resources for the language itself, any tools designed to facilitate programming in Raku, and Raku user groups, forums, tutorials, guides, or other resources.
Recommended Resources
Comma is an integrated development environment for Raku. Its features, syntax highlighting, editing, authoring support, code navigation, refactoring, running and debugging, test coverage, profiling, Cro integration, and IDEA platform are highlighted. Screenshots, documentation, and plans for future development are put forth, along with answers to frequently asked questions, and changes in the current release. The Comma IDE and plugin may be downloaded, and Comma Complete may be purchased.
https://commaide.com/
Learning Raku (formerly Perl 6)
Created by Brian D. Foy, the author of Learning Perl 6, an introductory tutorial on Raku. This site highlights the book and discusses other topics related to the programming language. Published by O’Reilly Media in 2018, it may be purchased there or from other retailers. Topics include Perl 6 design documentation, language documentation, modules, Rosetta Code example, Project Euler examples, and other Perl 6 examples, and other topics related to the language.
https://www.learningraku.com/
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike International License, this site features a guide to the Raku programming language, as well as links to other resources on the language. Chapters include an introduction, operators, variables, functions and mutators, loops and conditions, I/O, subroutines, functional programming, classes and objects, exception handling, regular expressions, Raku modules, Unicode, parallelism, concurrency, and asynchrony, and native calling interface.
https://raku.guide/
Formerly known as Perl 6, Raku is a feature-rich, multi-paradigm programming language. Several code examples are provided, along with a Rake guide, tutorials, screencasts, and links to online resources such as blogs, online practice playgrounds, available Raku compilers, editors, IDEs, marketing materials, and books published or in print on the programming language. Also included are links to Raku community sites, the development organization steering council, and the documentation team.
https://www.raku-lang.ir/en/
Raku Programming Language, The
The official site for Raku includes information on getting started with Raku, full documentation, and an introduction to Raku from Perl 5 programmers, as well as the Perl 6 modules directory, the Rakudo compiler, and language specifications and speculations. Downloads for Rakudo 6 and Rakudo Star, a distribution of Raku that supports the latest Diwali Perl 6, with installation instructions. Links to third-party packages and other sites within the Raku community are included.
https://raku.org/
Currently the only major Perl 6 compiler in active development, Rakudo is a Perl 6 compiler targeting MoarVM and the Java Virtual Machine, that implements the Perl 6 specification. Rakudo is written in C, Perl 6, and NQP, a lightweight Perl 6 implementation, and was released in 2009. Available under the Artistic License, it may be freely downloaded from the site. Other resources include documentation, bug reports, posts, files, and an acknowledgment of the Perl 6 community.
https://rakudo.org/
