Rakudo is made available through a series of distributions that contain the compiler, documentation, and some modules–things that we think might be useful to some one wanting to write Perl 6 programs. These distributions are called Rakudo * or Rakudo Star.
Rakudo Star is currently available from github at http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads/ .
Building the compiler from source
Tarballs of each monthly compiler release are available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads.
These tarballs do not contain the documentation or modules found in Rakudo Star. It is strongly recommended that you download a Rakudo Star distribution unless you are a developer looking to hack on the compiler internals.
Since Rakudo is under rapid development, potential developers should download Rakudo directly from github and build from there:
$ git clone git://github.com/rakudo/rakudo.git
If you don’t have git installed, you can also get a tarball or zip of the latest development snapshot of Rakudo from github by visiting http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/tree/master and clicking “Download”. Then unpack the tarball or zip.
Building Rakudo from the sources requires Perl 5.8 or newer, a C compiler, a make utility, git, and the ICU library.
Once these prerequisites are installed, build and install Rakudo as follows:
$ cd rakudo
$ perl Configure.pl --gen-parrot
$ make
$ make install
This will build and install a “perl6″ or “perl6.exe” executable, by default in the parrot_install/bin/ subdirectory of the rakudo build directory.
The “–gen-parrot” option tells Configure.pl to automatically download (via ‘git’) and build the version of Parrot most appropriate for the copy of Rakudo you currently have. It’s okay to use the –gen-parrot option on later invocations of Configure.pl; the configure system will re-build Parrot only if a newer version is needed for whatever version of Rakudo
you’re working with.
To run a Perl 6 program with Rakudo, include the install directory in your system PATH variable and issue a command like:
$ perl6 hello.pl
If the Rakudo compiler is invoked without an explicit script to run, it enters a small interactive mode that allows Perl 6 statements to be executed from the command line. Each line entered is treated as a separate compilation unit, however (which means that subroutines are preserved after they are defined, but variables are not).
Running the test suite
Entering “make test” will run a small test suite that comes bundled with Rakudo. This is a simple suite of tests, designed to make sure that the Rakudo compiler is basically working and that it’s capable of running a simple test harness.
Running “make spectest” will import relevant portions of the official Perl 6 test suite from Github (http://github.com/perl6/roast) and run all of the tests that are currently known to pass.
Note On GCC Version 4.1.2/4.1.3
These versions of GCC contain a bug that prevents building of Rakudo in the way described above. A workaround that has been known to work is to configure with optimization, like this:
perl ./Configure.pl --gen-parrot --gen-parrot-option=--optimize
We’ve looked for a workaround we could do in the code to try and avoid triggering the GCC bug, but there didn’t seem to be an obvious one. Please either try the workaround above, or use a different version of GCC.
Packages
For a number of platforms there are packaged versions of Rakudo (the compiler only), which are
very easy to install.
Is there a Debian/Ubuntu package?
Thanks
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But really, no debian/ubuntu package? I thought debian/ubuntu *are* the most popular Linux distributives, aren’t they?
wired, no deb package.
Rakudo packages are now available on Debian unstable. I’ve ironed out the last issue with i386 yesterday :-p
See this announce for some more details.
All the best
There is now! The rakudo package and parrot are both packaged for Debian. If you are running Debian testing, code named wheezy, you can just do an apt-get install rakudo. If you’re running Debian stable, you’ll have to download rakudo as a deb and install it.
WTF ? What is Rakudo? I was on Perl6.org ?!
I just clicked on the download button!?
Well, after the Fisher Price designed Home page with Butterflie,
I was expecting a User friendly download page with:
Windows Xp, Vista,7 : Perl6 x86.msi ; Perl6 x86-64.msi
Debian, Ubuntu : Perl6.deb
>>Then after the install, I would have clic on the Perl6 icone on my Desktop, et voilà!
No, I’m told to compile… and blablabla…
“The only requirement is that you know how to be nice to all kinds of people (and butterflies).”>>> LOL!!! except the beginners under Ubuntu or Windows!
I must agree with you. Having a 1-click installation and usage access under windows, should not be to much to ask for. This is 2012. I do not mean to be “un-nice” to no-one. But, it should be recognized to be of VERY EXTREMELY very very (extremely) high interest to the perl 6 development that millions of users started using rakudo on their pc’s. Thanks for your work p6 developers. F
It’s sad some folks don’t understand what “be nice (to volunteers)” means. A little bit of offset to the negative vibe:
Thank you, Rakudo team. Your directions were clear, and nearly perfect. (The “Running the test suite” section above is slightly outdated, in a minor way.) For some reason, during the install, my perl5.8.5 seemed to silently no-op the chmod of install/bin/perl6 (while perl5.8.3 worked fine); I’ll try to dig into that in a bit. But with little pain, I was able to get a HelloWorld to run, and am getting psyched to start using Perl6 for more than just playing. Nice work!
All you Debian/Ubuntu people check this out:
http://packages.debian.org/sid/rakudo
Here are the instructions for building on mac osx lion
create a new dir, say nuke and cd to it (xcode should be installed)
1)wget https://github.com/downloads/rakudo/star/rakudo-star-2011.07.tar.gz
2) tar -zxvf rakudo-star-2011.07.tar.gz
3)cd rakudo-star-2011.07
4)perl Configure.pl –gen-parrot
5)make
6)make install
Run perl6 from
nuke/rakudo-star-2011.07/perl6
works like a charm ;o)
This is awesome!
On a Debian Stable machine, I did:
root@debianbox> apt-get install rakudo parrot/testing parrot-minimal/testing parrot-devel/testing
and it Just Worked.
Thanks very much!
Cool. Installed without any problems on Mac OS X, 10.7.2, on Feb 18, 2012
using the instructions provided:
$ cd rakudo
$ perl Configure.pl –gen-parrot
$ make
$ make install
$ make test
Simple!