The past week Andrew Shitov pulled of a neat trick: providing the Raku Course as a “Learn Raku” app for both iOS as well as Android (/r/rakulang comments). Learn Raku in the privacy of your own phone, pad or even notebook (entirely offline) while still being able to execute / tweak all examples!

Associated with this, two blog posts were written:

• Raku as a foreign language and more: learn.raku.online
• Raku Course updates

Greg’s Corner

Greg Donald introduced Keayl, a Model-View-Controller web framework for Raku (/r/rakulang comments), with an example website using the Raku documentation.

Naoum’s Corner

Naoum Hankache provided a really nice update to the Raku Guide, the introduction to Raku for beginners (/r/rakulang comments). Available in on-line version, PDF or EPUB in 14 different languages!

FOSDEM DevRoom

The Raku Foundation and the Perl Foundation together applied for a shared devroom at the 2027 FOSDEM conference. And it was granted! So expect a Call For Presentations to be issued soon!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenges #396 and #397 are available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• Use (some of?) IEEE 754 total ordering rules for cmp_n
• State Rakudo’s LLM policy
• Respect XDG_DATA_HOME for the user CompUnit repository
• Streamline infix:<cmp>(Num,Num)/(num,num)
• Make .sort(&mapper) up to 60% faster
• Make List/Array.sum about 14% faster
• Make List/Array.EXISTS-POS(uint) (about 3% faster)
• Make List/Array.EXISTS-POS(Int:D) about 70% faster
• Reduce List.FLATTENABLE_LIST bytecode size (364 -> 340)
• Make List.join upto 40% faster
• Make List.tail about 13% faster
• Make Array.FLATTENABLE_LIST inlineable (388 -> 374)

Core Developments

• Daniel Green bumped Żmij to v1.2, and significantly reduced the number of $?CLASS lookups in NQP.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen was pretty busy:
  • Fixed an issue with .clone and native unsigned integer attributes
  • Fixed an issue with dd() not reporting proper scope
  • Made .sort upto 2.1x as fast if list consists of just Int / Num / Str
  • Various optimizations in RakuAST bootstrap and Rakudo core
• Matt Doughty fixed two issues related to paths on Windows.

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• An alternative idea by Tirifto.

Meanwhile on Lobsters

• A really cool string representation by spillybones.

Comments about Raku

• Invocant controls method dispatch by –predecrement.
• Maybe there is already one? by rob74.
• An ambitious vibe-coded project by F3nd0.
• To go beyond regular expressions by kbenson.
• How regex was fixed by nagaiaida.
• Raku excluded by forgotpwd16.

New Raku Modules

• Red::Driver::MySQL “MySQL driver and schema reader for the Red ORM” by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Build::Rust “Build Rust crates at install time and locate their binaries at run time” by John Haltiwanger.
• DSL::English::IntegrationWorkflows “Making (computational) integration workflows using natural language commands” by Anton Antonov.
• HTTP::RequestTarget::Raw “Lossless structural parsing of visible-ASCII HTTP request targets” by an AI-operated software project maintained by GBX Raw Target Lab.
• WebService::CareJobs “Client for the free CareJobs webservice” by CareJobs.Now.
• static “Opt-in compile-time type checking for the current RakuAST compilation unit” by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• COIN-OR “Interface to the COIN-OR numerical optimization solver” by Anton Antonov.
• SEO::WebChecker “Technical SEO audit engine & on-page analyzer for Raku” by jaiganesh6999.
• Math::Optimization “Mathematical optimization algorithms” by Anton Antonov.
• Distribution::Builder::Cmake-alt “A zef builder to aid in binding CMake projects to Raku” by Grizzly Smith.
• Math::QuantileRegression “A package for Quantile Regression calculations” by Anton Antonov.
• ClickHouse “Type-aware ClickHouse client with live query progress” by rdeytoth.
• DB::DuckDB “DuckDB driver for the Raku DB interface – NativeCall binding over libduckdb” by skyter10086.
• Alien::Libduckdb “Build and locate libduckdb (the DuckDB C library) from source” by skyter10086.

Updated Raku Modules

• PDF, PDF::Class by David Warring.
• Parse::Paths, App::Backup, Usage::Utils, Gzz::Text::Utils, GOTO, GUI::Editors, Gzz::Paths, App::fix.raku, App::Doc-N-Save, App::Urls, Gzz::Readline by Grizzly Smith.
• MoarVM::Bytecode by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Geo::Polyline, Duckie, Jupyter::Kernel, App::samaki by Brian Duggan.
• WebDriver2 by zjmarlow.
• Math::NIntegrate, FunctionalParsers, DSL::Shared, DSL::Translators, Grammar::TokenProcessing, Math::Splines, JavaScript::Google::Charts by Anton Antonov.
• Elucid8::Build by Richard Hainsworth.
• BinaryHeap by Peter du Marchie van Voorthuysen.
• JSON::Native by Andrew Shitov.
• Cooklang by Erik Johansen.
• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• LIVR by Viktor Turskyi.
• YAMLScript, YAMLStar by Ingy døt Net.
• Term::Choose by Matthäus Kiem.
• jmp by Nigel Hamilton.
• RakuPM by skyter10086.
• Gnome::N, Gnome::Gio, Gnome::Gtk4, Gnome::Gdk4, Gnome::Gsk4 by Marcel Timmerman.
• Qwiratry, Qwiratry::Test, Qwiratry::Format::JSON by Tim Nelson.
• LLM::Chat, MCP::Client, HuggingFace::API, OpenRouter::API, ComfyUI::API, MCP::Server::Tool::Ask, MCP::Server::Tool::FileSystem, MCP::Server::Tool::Shell, MCP::Server::Tool::Web, JobQueue, LLM::Data::Pipeline, HuggingFace::API, App::Ariza, LLM::Classifiers::Emotions, LLM::Data::Inference, LLM::Agent, Notcurses::Native, Vips::Native by Matt Doughty.
• FFmpegProgressBar by Sasha Abbott.

Winding down

Wow, a fully functional Raku on mobile devices! And a flood of new modules, some clearly LLM developed.

Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work! Even after week 92 of hopefully only 209.

Meanwhile, still: Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

If you like what I’m doing, donating to the Raku Foundation would mean a great deal to me!