Raku++

• PlatformsmacOS, Linux, Windows
• LicenseOpen source, free
• InstallHomebrew or prebuilt binaries

⭐ Raku++ on GitHub

Raku++ is our from-scratch implementation of the Raku programming language: a hand-written lexer, parser, and evaluator in plain C++17, with no third-party dependencies. It is not a fork of the reference implementation and shares no code with it — it targets the language itself, and it is developed test-first against Roast, the official Raku test suite, of which it currently passes about 80% — over 170,000 individual tests.

Highlights

• Real Raku. Classes, roles, grammars, regexes, multiple dispatch, junctions, lazy sequences, big-number arithmetic, Unicode-correct strings, and concurrency.
• A native compiler. Raku++ runs your scripts directly, and can also compile a program into a standalone native executable with a single --exe flag.
• An optimizer. The -O switch enables native code paths that make hot numeric code many times faster — up to 42× on some of our benchmarks.
• A single self-contained binary. Nothing to configure and no runtime to install: download it and run your program.
• The browser, too. As Raku.js, the same interpreter is compiled to WebAssembly and runs entirely in the browser — try it live at course.raku.org/playground.

Get it

Prebuilt binaries for macOS, Linux, and Windows are on the releases page. On macOS, you can install it with Homebrew:

brew tap ash/rakupp
brew install rakupp

Or build from source — all you need is a C++17 compiler and CMake.

Learning Raku?

Raku++ powers the instant playground of the Raku Course, our free online course of the language. Every example in the course can be edited and executed right on the page.