- PlatformsmacOS, Linux, Windows
- LicenseOpen source, free
- InstallHomebrew or prebuilt binaries
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
--exeflag. -
An optimizer. The
-Oswitch 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.
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 rakuppOr build from source — all you need is a C++17 compiler and CMake.
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.