Rakudo compiler, Release #190 (2026.02)

2026-02-28

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I’m very happy to announce the February 2026 release of Rakudo #190. 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 2026.02:

  • Improvements:

    • Simplify handing of RAKUDO_OPT environment variable [759e583f]
    • Add :by support to Range.min/max/minmax[9b0dfbc6]
    • Give enum A (a => 3.14, b => 6) a better error message [5e183241]
    • Micro-opt self.CREATE -> nqp::create(self) [6acaa900]
    • Suggest NFC, NFD, NFKC, NFKD when trying to do "foo".Uni [35428451]
    • Make some only method raku multi on instantiated invocant [7f39c4bb]

  • Fixes:

    • fix Windows MSI build [ff829b87]
    • Enforce deprecation of .perl [33f68d2c]
    • Give Mu.does a return type constraint [85871dc9]
    • Make error reporting more resilient wrt warnings [eeb97aca]

  • Additions:

  • RakuAST:

    • Revert/Cleanup some previous RakuAST commits: [6e474f82][d71d63d5]
    • give enum A (a => 3.14, b => 6) a better error message [b7a4e1a9]
    • fix for "add bare dd CHECK functionality (4fad427)" [1d155e52]
    • Default unnamed packages to anon scope instead of our [47d8befa]

  • Internal:

(no changes yet)

The following people contributed to this release:

Will Coleda, Elizabeth Mattijsen, librasteve, David Simon Schultz, Eric Forste, Justin DeVuyst, Patrick Böker, Coleman McFarland, Daniel Green, Márton Polgár, 2colours, 4zv4l

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 2026 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 (#191), is tentatively scheduled for 2026-03-28.

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/ ↩