Rakudo compiler, Release #191 (2026.03)

2026-03-28

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I’m happy to announce the March 2026 release of Rakudo #191. 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 2026.03:

  • Improvements:

    • Update to libtommath 1.3.0 [28d9a006]
    • Update to mimalloc v2.2.7 [7ab77078]
    • Provide better error when trying to decode too large blobs [06f16f6d]
    • Deprecate "-" as an STDIN/STDOUT indicator in 6.d [3e6406f5][d9f66ef1]
    • Deprecate Perl.new [baed6071]
    • Optimizations [ae4c136d][5c93e18b][babc6ca4][699cbac2][ac2c4cb4]

  • Fixes:

    • In methods of Cool that call methods of Str, coerce Cool parameters to the correct types [fffdb91f]

  • Additions:

    • Add CallFrame.language-revision [11e48594]
    • Add Rakudo::Internals.client-callframe method [17b9dc45]
    • Add Rakudo::Internals.client-language-revision [472105cd]
    • Add single named arg candidate to subtest [cfd44496]

  • RakuAST: [6d2fa67e][ddd5a97c][50276894][1cd333d8][d76960ba][2efcd855][400c61b9] [d13b7ab6][7a61872f][5697a5ac][759f8ba8][4e007063][fbe5a50b][8b0d6d23] [bc6c03c7][7bb73918][c318ac31][74da84b0][107ed65b][2c9345e8][fe2e46e3]

  • Internal:

    • Make all core constants "my" scoped [7fc93d52]
    • Update IO::Path.slurp [a77416b8][a97c7a33][af30c7be]

The following people contributed to this release:

Elizabeth Mattijsen, Will Coleda, Daniel Green, Justin DeVuyst, David Schultz, Eric Forste, Márton Polgár, Patrick Böker, Richard Hainsworth, ab5tract

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 (#192), is tentatively scheduled for 2026-04-25.

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/ ↩