Perl 6 at a Glance

Raku is a member of the Perl family of programming languages. Formerly known as Perl 6, it was renamed in October 2019. Raku introduces elements of many modern and historical languages. Compatibility with Perl was not a goal, though a compatibility mode is part of the specification. The design process for Raku began in 2000.

The Raku design process was first announced on 19 July 2000, on the fourth day of that year’s Perl Conference, by Larry Wall in his State of the Onion 2000 talk. At that time, the primary goals were to remove “historical warts” from the language; “easy things should stay easy, hard things should get easier, and impossible things should get hard”; a general cleanup of the internal design and APIs. The process began with a series of requests for comments or “RFCs”. This process was open to all contributors and left no aspect of the language closed to change.

Once the RFC process was complete, Wall reviewed and classified each of the 361 requests received. He then began the process of writing several “Apocalypses”, using the original meaning of the term, “revealing”. While the original goal was to write one Apocalypse for each chapter of Programming Perl, it became obvious that, as each Apocalypse was written, previous Apocalypses were being invalidated by later changes. For this reason, a set of Synopses was published, each one relating the contents of an Apocalypse, but with any subsequent changes reflected in updates. Today, the Raku specification is managed through the “roast” testing suite, while the Synopses are kept as a historical reference.

There are also a series of Exegeses written by Damian Conway that explain the content of each Apocalypse in terms of practical usage. Each Exegesis consists of code examples along with a discussion of the usage and implications of the examples.

There are three primary methods of communication used in the development of Raku today. The first is the raku IRC channel on Libera Chat. The second is a set of mailing lists. The third is the Git source code repository hosted at GitHub.