I’m starting a series of articles devoted to Raku for beginners. But…
… this series is not about Raku basics. Instead here one can find information about how Raku works from inside-out. I plan to write about things which are often either not on the surface, or not well-documented yet, or totally hidden behind the scenes for any other reason.
You may ask why is it for beginners then? Let me correct myself a little: the audience is expected to be Raku beginners. Otherwise I expect a reader to already know such programming concepts as object orientation, memory management, common language constructs, etc. Say, I expect the following code snippet to be understood on the level “well, we declare a class, instantiate it and call a method which outputs something and sums its arguments; looks like the result of the sum is returned!”:
class Foo {
method foo(Int $a, Int $b) {
say "Hello!";
$a + $b
}
}
my $foo = Foo.new.foo(42, 13);
say $foo;
If you have trouble understanding the above example then my reccomendation would be to visit Amazon or any other online or offline book store first and start with one of the great books about Perl6. And if the language history is also terra incognita for you, don’t get confused here. It once started as Perl6 but was renamed into Raku in October 2019.
For those who feel the bravery to dive deep into the language internals, I promise to do my best in starting with simpler concepts. Sometimes it’d also mean that not really relevant details could be omitted for ease of reading. Then each next article would be getting to more complicated concepts as gradual as possible.
As a matter of fact, the series just’ve started by telling about Perl6 and Raku and how they’re the same. It is now time to tell about Rakudo.
In the modern world of programming it is now common place for a language to be
its implementation. Perl is the perl command, Ruby is ruby, etc. Not that
this statement is totally true. After all, JavaScript has several different
implementations. But in general it’s not rare to see people mixing up a command
with the language it compiles.
From the start Raku was developed with possibility of many implementations in mind. Even though at the moment I’m writing these lines the language is only implemented by Rakudo compiler, it is still not considered to be the compiler. And I would like to ask you, my reader, to remember this difference: though Rakudo implements Raku, Rakudo is not the Raku. On practice it means one very important thing: sometimes I might write about implementation details which are specific to Rakudo. A new compiler might have the very same things implemented differently in the future. Whenever I’ll be writing about such specifics will try to remember to leave special notes about this.
And as I don’t want to get people bored from the start, this is perhaps the best moment to call it a day. Buckle up and let’s drive!
One More Thing
Use the documentation, Luke! Because it is and will always be The Power. But as no Power can be ubiquitous there’re will always be a story to tell!
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