Chapter 11 · 24 July – 17 September

Raku that travels

An interpreter that works in its developer's shell is the easy part. v4.0.0 was named, a month before any of its code existed, "Raku that travels". It set three goals: installing modules without Rakudo or zef, compiled binaries that carry everything they need or refuse to build, and Raku as a library other languages can call.

16.0 → 5.7 msto use XML, once parsed modules were cached

2.7 msa 278 KB JSON document through the native extension ABI, against ~440 ms in pure Raku

6host languages calling one C API: C++, Go, JavaScript, Python, Rust, Wolfram

The turnBefore v4.0.0, a module that could not be embedded in a compiled binary was skipped silently. The binary still built, and needed the disk at run time. Now every compile mode reports what it embedded and what it could not, and why. --standalone turns any such skip into a build failure.

Modules

24 Julzef install works end to end under Raku++. The next day it installed a module from the live ecosystem, and every blocker it hit was a general engine bug.
1 AugA precompilation cache. It stores the parsed tree, not bytecode (there is none), and is validated by content hash, never by timestamp: use XML 16.0 → 5.7 ms interpreted.
2 AugNativeCall through libffi, loaded at run time. Before that the FFI was dlsym and one over-wide prototype of eight integers and eight doubles.
9 AugA native extension ABI (rakupp_ext.h). Its first user parsed a 278 KB JSON document in 2.7 ms, against about 440 ms for the same module's Raku code. The next day a check found that on Linux an extension's first call had always crashed: a plain ELF executable keeps its symbols out of the dynamic table.
12 Augrakupp install, itself a Raku program. It resolves the fez index, verifies each file's checksum, runs the distribution's own tests, and writes the same store layout Rakudo and zef use. A seven-distribution graph installed by Raku++ loads under Rakudo, and both engines enumerate the same 727 SPDX licenses from it. uninstall --check's first real run found store damage that was breaking Rakudo's own use File::Temp.
17 Sep · v4.0.0%?RESOURCES in compiled binaries. It had been an empty hash in every compiled binary. %?RESOURCES<x> answered Any, and the program died with a message that never mentioned resources. Meanwhile --standalone reported "embedded 1 module" and exited 0.

The plan said to serve resources from memory. That was wrong: is native(%?RESOURCES<libraries/x>) hands its value to dlopen, which needs a path on a real filesystem. A distribution now writes its resources to one temporary directory on first use, and it is removed at exit. A binary that never reads a resource never creates one, and say "Hello" compiles byte-identically.

Raku as a library

The extension ABI turned out to be the harder half of an embedding API, so the two share one vocabulary of values rather than growing two. v3.1.0 (11 August) exported the C API, and the bindings followed: Python, C++, JavaScript on bun, Go and Rust on 12 August, then Wolfram on 24 August. Anton Antonov published the Wolfram one as a paclet, RakuppLink.

The reason anyone outside the project would care is grammars. "Embed Raku in Python" is abstract. "Use Raku grammars from Python" is something the host language has nothing like: a regex library gives you one pattern, not a composable grammar with named rules, inheritance and longest-token dispatch. The grammar stays a .raku file, and each host's class is generated from it. One corpus runs from every host in CI, and the outputs must match byte for byte.

More places to run

21 JulOpenBSD, from an outside contribution: stack-size introspection and a CI job in a VM. Its archive has been a release asset since the next day.
7 AugA grown-up command line. Perl's one-liner surface (-n -p -a -F -l -0, in-place -i[.bak], -M, clusters like -lane), checked against a live perl. -i refuses loudly where Perl is silent. Building it exposed that my $*OUT = $handle did not reroute say.
11 Sep · v3.27.0Windows becomes a platform. $*DISTRO.is-win had been hard-coded False. The FFI went from eight integer arguments to sixteen, with pointers the width of a machine word: a real HMODULE had reached its caller as -2003238912. There is a PowerShell one-liner and an installer that keeps PATH expandable.
12 Sepcurl -fsSL https://raku.online/install.sh | sh, which verifies SHA-256, and rakupp upgrade.
15 SepA report that the Linux build would not start on Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12 or RHEL 9: it needed glibc 2.38. Builds moved to manylinux 2.28, and the floor is glibc 2.28, from 2018.