Rakudo Perl

Rakudo Perl 6 (or simply "Rakudo") is a Perl 6 compiler targeting MoarVM, and the Java Virtual Machine, that implements the Perl 6 specification. It is currently in active development.

Originally developed within the Parrot project, the Rakudo source code repository was split from the project in February 2009 so that it could be developed independently, although there were still many dependencies at the time. Rakudo is written in C, Perl 6, and the lightweight Perl 6 implementation "NQP" (Not Quite Perl).

Rakudo Perl #14 was released in February 2009, codenamed Vienna after the Perl mongers group that had sponsored one of its developers since April 2008. Subsequent releases have used codenames based on Perl mongers groups.

The first major release of a distribution of both compiler and modules (named "Rakudo *" or "Rakudo Star") was released on July 29, 2010. The most recent release of Rakudo Star was made on May 1, 2017.

The name "Rakudo" for the Perl 6 compiler was first suggested by Damian Conway. "Rakudo" is short for "Rakuda-dō" (with a long 'o'; ), which is Japanese for "Way of the Camel". "Rakudo" (with a short 'o'; ) also means "paradise" in Japanese.

The term "Rakudo Perl 6" was also chosen to distinguish between the name of a language implementation ("Rakudo") from the name of the language specification ("Perl 6"). To understand why, one must understand that Perl 6 is a specification and any implementation that passes the official test suite could call itself “Perl 6”. There are currently several implementations at various levels of maturity, with only Rakudo implementing full Perl 6 and NQP for Perl 6 subset.