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. Across the whole Raku ecosystem, 637 of 2,524 distributions pass their own install-time test suites; the guide is MODULES.md.

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