This is Rakudo Perl, a Perl 6 compiler for the MoarVM and JVM.

Rakudo Perl is Copyright (C) 2008-2017, The Perl Foundation. Rakudo Perl is distributed under the terms of the Artistic License 2.0. For more details, see the full text of the license in the file LICENSE.

This directory contains only the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler itself; it does not contain any of the modules, documentation, or other items that would normally come with a full Perl 6 distribution. If you're after more than just the bare compiler, please download the latest Rakudo Star package.

Note that different backends implement slightly different sets of features. For a high-level overview of implemented and missing features, please visit the features page on perl6.org.

Recent changes and feature additions are documented in the docs/ChangeLog text file.

See the INSTALL.txt file for detailed prerequisites and build and installation instructions.

The general process for building is running perl Configure.pl with the desired configuration options (common options listed below), and then running make or make install. Optionally, you may run make spectest to test your build on Roast, the Official Perl 6 test suite. To update the test suite, run make spectest_update.

Installation of Rakudo simply requires building and running make install. Note that this step is necessary for running Rakudo from outside the build directory. But don't worry, it installs locally by default, so you don't need any administrator privileges for carrying out this step.

To automatically download, build, and install a fresh MoarVM and NQP, run:

perl Configure.pl --gen-moar --gen-nqp --backends=moar

Please be aware, that this will install MoarVM and NQP into your given --prefix before Configure.pl exits.

Alternatively, feel free to git clone https://github.com/perl6/nqp and https://github.com/MoarVM/MoarVM manually and install them individually.

Note that to run Rakudo on JVM, JDK 1.8 must be installed. To automatically download, build, and install a fresh NQP, run:

perl Configure.pl --gen-nqp --backends=jvm

If you get an out of memory error building rakudo on the JVM, you may need to modify your NQP runner to limit memory use. e.g. edit the nqp-j / nqp-j.bat executable (found wherever you installed to, or in the install/bin directory) to include -Xms500m -Xmx2g as options passed to java.

Please be aware, that this will install NQP into your given --prefix before Configure.pl exits.

Alternatively, feel free to git clone https://github.com/perl6/nqp manually and install it individually.

By supplying combinations of backends to the --backends flag, you can get two or three backends built in the same prefix. The first backend you supply in the list is the one that gets the perl6 name as a symlink, and all backends are installed separately as perl6-m or perl6-j for Rakudo on MoarVM, or JVM respectively.

The format for the --backends flag is:

$ perl Configure.pl --backends=moar,jvm
$ perl Configure.pl --backends=ALL

There are several mailing lists, IRC channels, and wikis available with help for Perl 6 and Rakudo. Figuring out the right one to use is often the biggest battle. Here are some rough guidelines:

The central hub for Perl 6 information is perl6.org. This is always a good starting point.

If you have a question about Perl 6 syntax or the right way to approach a problem using Perl 6, you probably want the "perl6-users@perl.org" mailing list or the irc.freenode.net/#perl6 IRC channel. The perl6-users list is primarily for the people who want to use Perl 6 to write programs, so newbie questions are welcomed there. Newbie questions are also welcome on the #perl6 channel; the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams tend to hang out there and are generally glad to help. You can follow @perl6org and @rakudoperl on Twitter, and there's a Perl 6 news aggregator at Planet Perl 6.

Questions about NQP can also be posted to the #perl6 IRC channel. For questions about MoarVM, you can join #moarvm on freenode.

Please see https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/wiki/rt-introduction for more information about how and where to report issues with Rakudo, its components, and the Perl 6 language specification.

If you have a patch that fixes a bug or adds a new feature, please create a pull request using github's pull request infrastructure.

See our contribution guidelines for more information.

If you would like simple history and tab completion in the perl6 executable, you need to install the Linenoise module. The recommended way to install Linenoise is via zef:

zef install Linenoise

An alternative is to use a third-party program such as rlwrap.

Jonathan Worthington is the current pumpking for Rakudo Perl 6. See CREDITS for the many people that have contributed to the development of the Rakudo compiler.