← Raku++ in use

Mentions — Raku++ written about by other people

MENTIONS.md on GitHub ↗

Where somebody outside this project wrote about Raku++: newsletters, posts, threads, remarks in passing. Each entry is a link, a date, a name, and a plain account of what was actually said.

Three neighbouring files hold the things this one is not:

• BLOG.md — our own posts, on andrewshitov.com and dev.to.
• TALKS.md — our own talks.
• live/ADOPTIONS.md — other people's software that reached for the engine, which is adoption rather than a mention.

The bar: somebody else wrote it, published where a third party can read it without going through us, and it can be linked and dated. A mention that is lukewarm or critical belongs here on the same terms as a warm one — the point of the file is the record, not the applause. Our own announcement is the thing being reacted to, not a mention of it.

A link post is not writing. Our own posts get submitted to /r/rakulang and relayed by the newsletter as a matter of course, and neither the submission nor the relay is somebody choosing to write about Raku++ — so a thread only earns a row here when a third party started it, or when the comments under it say something worth quoting.

Raku Weekly News

Raku Weekly News, written by Elizabeth Mattijsen, is the Raku community's weekly newsletter, and it has carried Raku++ from the week of the announcement on.

Until 30 September 2026 it was called Rakudo Weekly News and lived at rakudoweekly.blog, so every issue listed here went out under that name. The old addresses redirect; the links here point at the new domain.

The first one is the one that matters: 2026.28/29/30 Thank you! gave the project a section headed Andrew's Playground — the compiler, raku.online, the Long Read, the finished Complete Raku Course and the books, in one place. It described Raku++ as a Raku compiler written in C++, linked the announcement and the Long Read, and pointed at the /r/rakulang comments. That is the introduction to the community, written by somebody else.

After that it has been steady, roughly a mention per release or per post:

• 2026.32 Dan Floating Hex (10 August 2026) — an Andrew's Corner on joining an editor to a playground in a live manner, linking the live-coding post and the /r/rakulang thread.
• 2026.33 All The Way To Infinity (18 August 2026) — the v3.14 post, as an overview of the most interesting parts.
• 2026.34 YAR by Coke (25 August 2026) — the live/ registry of other people's programs running unaltered, and the start of modules that use what Raku++ can do, JSON::Native among them, with a note on its performance.
• 2026.35 Infinity Revisited (31 August 2026) — the early adopters post, the benchmark board, and perlancar's remark, linked under the heading First time in ~18 years. App::Rakus in the module list.
• 2026.36/7 Multiplicity (14 September 2026) — CSV::Native in the module list.
• 2026.38 Italiano, per favore (21 September 2026) — the issue opens on the week's two posts, the Italian one, which gave the issue its title, and the module manager post covering v4.0.0. The three new localizations — L10N::UK, L10N::LV and L10N::RU — are in the new-module list, and got a sentence of their own in the opening about Raku programs written in those natural languages.
• 2026.39 Mainstreamed (29 September 2026) — an Andrew's Corner on the v5.0.0 post: Raku++ at 100.00% of Roast, and so able to call itself an implementation of the Raku Programming Language. The issue's closing words put it next to RakuAST becoming Rakudo's default as one of the week's two headlines — Raku++ reaching parity with Rakudo spectest-wise.
• 2026.40 Pythonesque (5 October 2026) — the issue opens on Raku++ as a Python module, with Raku grammars named as the reason a Python program would want it, and links the Using Raku in Python post and the second Junctions post. The next section explains the rename: there are now three viable implementations of the language, Rakudo only one of them, and the developers of Raku++ and Mutsu have promised to send their news in. L10N::RU, L10N::LV and L10N::UK are in the module list again.
• 2026.41 Riscy Business (12 October 2026) — the issue opens on the week's two posts, Raku++ on RISC-V, which the title plays on, and the module-install one, and on Webraku, a full-stack web framework for Raku. A Marton's Corner follows on the 2colours article — the issue names its author as Marton Polgar — and links Andrew's comment under it and the discussion on r/rakulang and Mastodon. Math::Wavelet and Webraku are in the new-module list, JSON::Native among the updated ones.
• 2026.42/43 APPropriate Raku (26 October 2026) — the issue opens on the Raku Course as a Learn Raku app for iOS and Android, which the title plays on: the course on a phone, a pad or a notebook, entirely offline, with every example still runnable and editable. It links the /r/rakulang comments and the two posts that came with it, learn.raku.online and the course update. The issue does not name the engine; the app's playground is Raku++. Its closing words call it a fully functional Raku on mobile devices. F3nd0's Hacker News comment is in the comments-about-Raku list, and JSON::Native among the updated modules.

perlancar, August 2026

perlancar — a prolific CPAN author, and the author of Bencher — starred the repository and wrote on X that he was "genuinely excited to use Perl 6 (Raku) again" for the first time in something like eighteen years, naming the millisecond start-up and calling native-compiled Raku++ only twice slower than Perl 5. Raku Weekly 2026.35 linked it as First time in ~18 years.

It is the most useful thing anyone has written about the project so far, because the second half of it is a bug report with the location field left blank. No program was named, so one was built to carry the claim: tools/bench/hashfill.raku and hashfill.pl, the same work line for line in both languages under a byte-identical-output gate. perl won it in every mode we had — the native binary at 113 ms of wall clock against perl's 82. The factor of two turned out to be three removable constants and none of them the hashing; after they were removed the compiled mode measured 82.1 ms against perl's 81.8 in the same sitting. perl is now a column in run-bench.raku, and the whole account is in docs/dev/findings/HASHFILL-AND-BIGINT.md.

An outside remark became a kernel, and the kernel reached perl. That is what this file is for.

2colours, October 2026

Is generative AI killing or saving Raku? (dev.to, 5 October 2026) is by 2colours, a Raku contributor since 2021 who writes from outside the official Raku venues after a ban. It is the first longer piece by somebody else that takes Raku++ as one of its subjects, and it is mixed in the useful way.

The article opens on Raku++ and Mutsu as two "vibe-coded but ambitious" runtimes, and puts them next to the AI-written patches arriving in Rakudo and MoarVM. Its argument about Raku++ runs in three steps:

• The end of Rakudo's monopoly. For as long as Rakudo was the only usable runtime, Rakudo's behaviour was the language and Rakudo's developers were its stakeholders. Competing runtimes can break that loop. It notes that Raku++ treats Rakudo as a reference (quoting the Long Read), and that passing a module's own tests is a weaker claim than actually using the module.
• A plan bigger than a runtime. A section of its own about Andrew and raku.online: the guides, the training tasks, the showcases, and the Rakudo bugs page in particular, which surprised the author with how much context it carries. It reads the whole as a project with commercial intent, and says that if anyone in the community can sell Raku once the technical side holds up, it is him.
• Junctions. The reservation: some of Raku's problems are in the language design, not in any runtime, so a new runtime cannot fix them. The example is a first over a list holding a junction, which returns a junction; Raku++ and Mutsu both return any(1, 222), as Rakudo does, because that is how Junctions are designed to work — which is the author's point.

It ends on questions, three of them to the implementors of Raku++ and Mutsu: how authoritative Rakudo's behaviour is to them, short and long term, and what they do where Raku leaves behaviour unspecified; what the primary motive was; and how string and regex performance look. It also asks whether the use of the raku.online domain was discussed in the community.

Hacker News, October 2026

A mention in passing, in the comments under a story about the Iosevka font (14 October 2026). Under a comment arguing that LLMs will not take off in coding, F3nd0 wrote of being unsure what to think of their capabilities, and curious where ambitious vibe-coded projects like Raku++ will go, with a link to the repository.

Elizabeth Mattijsen replied that Raku++ is not vibe coding, linking Andrew's comment under the 2colours article. F3nd0 answered the next day with dictionary definitions: where the term means instructing an AI to write code, as Merriam-Webster, Cambridge and Collins have it, Raku++ is vibe-coded; where it also means not understanding the generated code well, as Wiktionary adds, it is not. The comment ends by asking which definition is the more correct one.

Raku Weekly 2026.42/43 listed the first comment among its comments about Raku, as An ambitious vibe-coded project.

Adding an entry

Keep it dated, linked and attributed, keep the note to what the source actually says, and put it in the table in date order with a section below if it deserves more than a line. If a mention sends us somewhere — a bug, a benchmark, a feature — say where it went, the way the perlancar entry does. A thread we started ourselves, or a relay of our own writing, is not an entry. Mentions of somebody's software using Raku++ go to live/ADOPTIONS.md instead.