How to get Rakudo Perl 6

Packages

For a number of platforms there are packaged versions of Rakudo, which are
very easy to install.

Building from source

Tarballs of each monthly release are available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads.

However, since Rakudo is under rapid development, we recommend downloading Rakudo directly from github and building from there:

$ git clone git://github.com/rakudo/rakudo.git

If you don't have git installed, you can also get a tarball or zip of the latest development snapshot of Rakudo from github by visiting http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/tree/master and clicking "Download". Then unpack the tarball or zip.

Building Rakudo from the sources requires Perl 5.8 or newer, a C compiler, a make utility, subversion, and the ICU library.

Once these prerequisites are installed, build and install Rakudo as follows:

$ cd rakudo
$ perl Configure.pl --gen-parrot
$ make
$ make install

This will build and install a "perl6" or "perl6.exe" executable, by default in the parrot_install/bin/ subdirectory of the rakudo build directory.

The "--gen-parrot" option tells Configure.pl to automatically download (via 'svn') and build the version of Parrot most appropriate for the copy of Rakudo you currently have. It's okay to use the --gen-parrot option on later invocations of Configure.pl; the configure system will re-build Parrot only if a newer version is needed for whatever version of Rakudo
you're working with.

To run a Perl 6 program with Rakudo, include the install directory in your system PATH variable and issue a command like:

$ perl6 hello.pl

If the Rakudo compiler is invoked without an explicit script to run, it enters a small interactive mode that allows Perl 6 statements to be executed from the command line. Each line entered is treated as a separate compilation unit, however (which means that subroutines are preserved after they are defined, but variables are not).

Running the test suite

Entering "make test" will run a small test suite that comes bundled with Rakudo. This is a simple suite of tests, designed to make sure that the Rakudo compiler is basically working and that it's capable of running a simple test harness.

Running "make spectest" will import relevant portions of the official Perl 6 test suite from the Pugs repository (http://svn.pugscode.org/pugs/t/spec/) and run all of the tests that are currently known to pass.

At present we do not have any plans to directly store the official test suite as part of the Rakudo/Parrot repository, but will continue to fetch it from the Pugs repository.

Note On GCC Version 4.1.2/4.1.3

These versions of GCC contain a bug that prevents building of Rakudo in the way described above. A workaround that has been known to work is to configure with optimization, like this:

perl ./Configure.pl --gen-parrot --gen-parrot-option=--optimize

We've looked for a workaround we could do in the code to try and avoid triggering the GCC bug, but there didn't seem to be an obvious one. Please either try the workaround above, or use a different version of GCC.