Raku++

• PlatformsmacOS, Linux, Windows
• LicenseOpen source, free
• InstallHomebrew or prebuilt binaries

⭐ Raku++ on GitHub

Raku++ is our from-scratch implementation of the Raku programming language: a hand-written lexer, parser, and evaluator in plain C++17, with no third-party dependencies. It is not a fork of the reference implementation and shares no code with it — it targets the language itself, and it is developed test-first against Roast, the official Raku test suite, of which it currently passes about 80% — over 170,000 individual tests.

Highlights

• Real Raku. Classes, roles, grammars, regexes, multiple dispatch, junctions, lazy sequences, big-number arithmetic, Unicode-correct strings, and concurrency.
• A native compiler. Raku++ runs your scripts directly, and can also compile a program into a standalone native executable with a single --exe flag.
• An optimizer. The -O switch enables native code paths that make hot numeric code many times faster — up to 42× on some of our benchmarks.
• A single self-contained binary. Nothing to configure and no runtime to install: download it and run your program.
• The browser, too. As Raku.js, the same interpreter is compiled to WebAssembly and runs entirely in the browser — try it live at course.raku.org/playground.
• A phone, too. Linked into an app as native code, the same interpreter runs on iPhone, iPad, and Android — the Learn Raku app uses it to run the examples of the course right on the device, offline.

Get it

Prebuilt binaries for macOS, Linux, and Windows are on the releases page. On macOS, you can install it with Homebrew:

brew tap ash/rakupp
brew install rakupp

Or build from source — all you need is a C++17 compiler and CMake.

Commercial support

Raku++ is free, and organisations that run Raku in production can also get support from the team that builds it: support agreements, fixes and features on demand, help moving code from Rakudo, performance work and training. See what we offer.

How it was built

From an empty directory to 90% of the official specification suite, a native code generator, and a browser build — in under a month. We wrote up the whole engineering effort: the projects that grew around the compiler, the four independent yardsticks we measured it against, and the speed work behind its two-millisecond startup. Read the story.

Learning Raku?

Raku++ powers the instant playground of the Raku Course, our free online course of the language. Every example in the course can be edited and executed right on the page.

On phones and tablets, the whole course is the Learn Raku app, where Raku++ runs the examples and your own programs on the device itself, with no connection needed.