Rakudo compiler, Release #187 (2025.11)

2025-11-15

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I’m happy to announce the November 2025 release of Rakudo #187. Rakudo is an implementation of the Raku1 language.

The source tarball for this release is available from https://rakudo.org/files/rakudo. Pre-compiled archives will be available shortly.

New in 2025.11:

  • Improvements:

    • MoarVM now uses rapidhash v3 [74bbe190]
    • Give any() a @foo candidate for performance [b92e33cc]
    • Allow native attributes to be twiddled with .clone [78a43bc2]
    • Improve the Windows first time experience [5ddbdb98][5438dea2][3d21d069][221cf2c8][ac97ef20]

  • Fixes:

    • Fix typo in error message: udp-bind -> bind-udp [40380963]
    • Don't allow a Range in an array shape specification (#6013) [f7ce946e]

  • RakuAST:

    • fix =table checks for numbered tables [71170603][0121b338]
    • allow ::Block.new() to take :$multiness [44bb652d]
    • Fix some bugs found by TRAE IDE [690b7f07]
    • don't allow :{ } if it's a block [c1d8805e]
    • don't allow &( ) contextualizer [dd78e653]

  • Internal:

    • Resolve potential NP references [2785bfe9][a58018a2][e2c55717]
    • update NQP/MoarVM pre-release [7106759e]
    • Mark Hyper class as an implementation detail [89dff65d]
    • Release engineering cleanups [6a9e284f][4a043ba5][e90f70e3][efba5598][393a34ad][b1eca4bc][1e483e1f][1741ccdf][61429b0c][147791df][bf0488e2][c06cf642][74927a8d][a69582ea][632378cb][95c56c2f][ffeb4260][bebd4a0f][e1b3f927][bb515e4a][6fe6c5f0][f6126111][0949e869][40b4e11b][211197cb]

The following people contributed to this release:

Will Coleda, Elizabeth Mattijsen, Eric Forste, Patrick Böker, librasteve, David Schultz, Timo Paulssen, Anton Oks, Daniel Green, Geoffrey Broadwell, Jake Boeckerman, Jimmy Zhuo, Nahuel Pacheco (NaP), Sizhe Zhao, jubilatious1

This release implements 6.c and 6.d versions of the Raku specification. 6.c version of the language is available if you use the use v6.c version pragma, otherwise 6.d is the default.

Upcoming releases in 2025 will include new functionality that is not part of 6.c or 6.d specifications, available with a lexically scoped pragma. Our goal is to ensure that anything that is tested as part of 6.c and 6.d specifications will continue to work unchanged. There may be incremental spec releases this year as well.

If you would like to contribute or get more information, visit https://raku.org, https://rakudo.org/community, or join us on IRC (#raku on Libera), the Discord, or the [email protected] mailing list.

Additionally, we invite you to make a donation to The Raku Foundation to sponsor Raku development: https://rakufoundation.org/donate (put “Raku Core Development Fund” in the ‘Purpose’ text field)

The next release of Rakudo (#188), is tentatively scheduled for 2025-12-20.

The development team appreciates feedback! If you’re using Rakudo, do get back to us. Questions, comments, suggestions for improvements, cool discoveries, incredible hacks, or any other feedback are welcome through the channels listed above.

  1. See https://raku.org/ ↩