13 July 2026
Meet Raku++, our new compiler for the Raku language
We are excited to announce Raku++ — a brand-new, from-scratch implementation of the Raku programming language, written entirely in C++ with no third-party dependencies.
Raku++ is open source and lives on GitHub: github.com/ash/rakupp.
Why it matters
Raku is one of the most expressive programming languages ever designed, and Raku++ makes it fast to start and easy to ship. It is a single self-contained binary: download it, run your program, done.
my @primes = (2..*).grep(*.is-prime);
say @primes[^10];The highlights
- Real Raku. Classes, roles, grammars, regexes, multiple dispatch, junctions, lazy sequences, big-number arithmetic, Unicode-correct strings, and concurrency — it is all there.
-
A native compiler. Besides running your scripts directly, Raku++ can compile a program into a standalone native executable with a single
--exeflag. -
An optimizer. The
-Oswitch enables native code paths that speed up hot numeric code many times over — up to 42× on some of our benchmarks. - Measured, not promised. Raku++ is developed test-first against Roast, the official Raku test suite, and currently passes about 80% of it — over 170,000 individual tests.
- Zero dependencies. A hand-written lexer, parser, and evaluator in plain C++17. No virtual machine to install, nothing to configure.
Get it today
Prebuilt binaries are available for macOS, Linux, and Windows on the releases page, and macOS users can simply:
brew tap ash/rakupp
brew install rakupp
Raku++ is also the engine behind two more announcements coming this week — stay tuned.
Star the project, try it on your own code, and tell us what breaks: github.com/ash/rakupp.