Install it

macOS

Homebrew

brew tap ash/rakupp
brew install rakupp

brew install --HEAD rakupp     # or: the latest main branch

Apple Silicon installs a prebuilt binary and compiles nothing; Intel builds from source. Homebrew itself needs the Xcode Command Line Tools — if brew install asks for them, run xcode-select --install first.

Every platform, and how it is served

Supported platforms

Five prebuilt archives ship with every release, each self-contained and each with a .sha256 beside it on the releases page. Nothing in them needs installing — they only need unpacking. Every one is built and smoke-tested in CI on the platform it targets.

Unpack keeping the bin/ lib/ include/ layout together — that is what --exe links against — and put bin/ on your PATH. rakupp finds its runtime library relative to its own binary, so it works from any directory; if you copy the executable somewhere on its own, point it back with RAKUPP_HOME=<prefix>.

Anywhere else — Linux on ARM, another BSD, a distribution older than the archive expects — build from source. It needs CMake and a C++17 compiler and nothing else: there are no third-party libraries to find first, which is what makes the list above short rather than a matrix. Two cases have their own route rather than an archive: NixOS, which cannot run the generic Linux binary at all (it has no global ELF interpreter), and Guix, which has a channel.

Anywhere with a C++17 compiler

From source

There are no third-party dependencies to fetch first — CMake and a compiler is the whole list.

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build                       # → build/rakupp

# install the binary and the runtime --exe links against
cmake --install build --prefix ~/.local   # → ~/.local/{bin,lib,include/rakupp}

On Windows, build from a Developer Command Prompt and pass the configuration to the build step — the Visual Studio generator is multi-config, so -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE alone is not enough:

cmake -S . -B build
cmake --build build --config Release       # → build\Release\rakupp.exe

Linux

GNU Guix

The repository is also a Guix channel, contributed by @4zv4l. From a checkout:

guix build -f .guix/modules/rakupp-package.scm

Or add the channel to ~/.config/guix/channels.scm:

(channel
  (name 'rakupp)
  (url "https://github.com/ash/rakupp")
  (branch "main"))

guix pull && guix install rakupp

Linux · NixOS

Nix

nix run github:ash/rakupp -- -e 'say 42'
nix profile install github:ash/rakupp

From a checkout, nix build produces ./result/bin/rakupp.

First run

Check that it works

rakupp --version
rakupp -e 'say "hello, world"'
rakupp -e 'say (1..100).grep(*.is-prime).sum'      # → 1060
echo 'say 42' | rakupp
rakupp program.raku

Cold start is about two milliseconds, so one-liners and shell glue feel like any other native tool. The same program in your browser, with nothing installed, is the playground.

The command line

The options worth knowing

Flags are position-independent and cluster like perl's, so rakupp -pi.bak -e '$_ = $_.subst("a", "b")' *.txt works as you would hope. RAKUPP_PARALLEL=1 opts into true CPU parallelism for start and worker threads. The full reference is CLI.md.

The ecosystem

Modules

Raku++ reads the same store zef populates, so a distribution installed once is picked up by use with no further setup.

use JSON::Fast;                             # installed with `zef install JSON::Fast`
say to-json({ name => 'Ada' }, :!pretty);   # {"name":"Ada"}

Your own files under lib/ are found too, as are -I, RAKULIB and use lib paths. A use that cannot be found, or fails to compile, is fatal — the program stops rather than carrying on without the module. Fifty of the fifty-nine distributions in the sample pass their own install-time test suites; the guide is MODULES.md.

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