For building Rakudo you need at least a C compiler, a "make" utility, and Perl 5.10.1 or newer on all platforms except Windows which needs Perl 5.22. To automatically obtain and build MoarVM as well as NQP, you may also need a git client, which is also needed for fetching the test suite.
Building Rakudo can sometimes take >1.4G of memory when compiling for the MoarVM runtime. The requirements are higher for the JVM backend.
(Perl is installed by default already). To enable parallel testing you also need the CPAN module Test::Harness in version 3.16 or newer; you can control the number of parallel jobs with the "TEST_JOBS" environment variable. If TEST_JOBS is not specified, 6 jobs will be used.
If you're wanting the bleeding-edge version of the Rakudo Raku compiler, we recommend downloading Rakudo directly from GitHub and building it from there.
$ git clone https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo.git
If you don't have git installed, you can get a tarball of Rakudo from https://rakudo.org/downloads/rakudo/. Then unpack the tarball.
If you already have cloned Rakudo from GitHub, you can get (pull) the most recent version from GitHub like this:
$ cd rakudo
$ git pull
Once you have an up-to-date copy of Rakudo, build it as follows:
$ perl Configure.pl --gen-moar --gen-nqp --backends=moar # Moar only
or:
$ perl Configure.pl --gen-nqp --backends=jvm # needs JDK 1.9 installed
then:
$ make install
This will create a "install" directory with "install/bin/rakudo" or "install\bin\rakudo.exe" executables. Additionally, for each selected backend, there will be a rakudo-* binary. Also, there will be "raku" symlink (a copy on Windows) to the last configured and installed "rakudo-*" backend binary.
Programs can then be run from the "install" directory using a command like:
$ ./install/bin/rakudo hello.raku
or:
$ ./install/bin/raku hello.raku
If you want to have rakudo, nqp, and moar installed into a different directory, you may supply --prefix= to Configure.pl. For example, with:
$ perl Configure.pl --gen-moar --gen-nqp --backends=moar --prefix=$HOME/raku
all binaries will be found under $HOME/raku/bin:
$ $HOME/raku/bin/rakudo hello.raku
Simply running "rakudo" will drop you into a REPL (read-eval-print-loop) that you can use for exploratory programming:
$ ./install/bin/rakudo
To find out the version and backend of the current binary one can use --version command line argument:
$ ./install/bin/raku --version
See the manual page ("docs/running.pod") for more about command-line options.
If you would like readline-like features in REPL, such as command history, line editing, and tab completion for builtins, you should install the Linenoise module via recommended Raku package manager zef:
$ zef install Linenoise
More information about zef itself and how to install it can be found at https://github.com/ugexe/zef.
The "--gen-moar" above option tells Configure.pl to automatically download and build the most appropriate version of NQP and MoarVM into local "nqp/" and "nqp/MoarVM/" subdirectories, install NQP and MoarVM into the "install/" subdirectory or into the one specified with "--prefix", and use them for building Rakudo. It's okay to use the "--gen-moar" option on later invocations of Configure.pl; the configure system will re-build NQP and/or MoarVM only if a newer version is needed for whatever version of Rakudo you're working with.
The versions of any already installed NQP or MoarVM binaries must satisfy a minimum specified by the Rakudo being built -- Configure.pl and "make" will verify this for you. Released versions of Rakudo generally build against the latest release of MoarVM; checkouts of Rakudo's HEAD revision from GitHub often require a version of MoarVM that is newer than the most recent MoarVM monthly release.
Occasionally, there may be problems when building or installing Rakudo. Make sure you have a backup of any custom changes you have done to the source tree before performing the following steps:
Before doing anything else, take a look at the many options available with make:
$ make --help
...
Get detailed output by trying:
$ make --trace
which should help pinpoint source file problems.
If you are still having problems, try to remove the "install/" subdirectory:
$ cd rakudo
$ rm -r install
$ git pull
$ perl Configure.pl --gen-moar --gen-nqp --backends=moar # for instance
$ make install
Or, in case you are really stuck, start with a fresh source tree:
$ rm -r rakudo
$ git clone git://github.com/rakudo/rakudo.git
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 the official Raku test suite from the "roast" repository http://github.com/Raku/roast/ and run all of these tests that are currently known to pass.
Roast is not planned and unlikely to ever be included into the Rakudo distribution. Instead, releases of Rakudo will fetch a snapshot of the roast repository as of the time of the release.
You can also use "make" to run an individual test from the command line:
$ make t/spec/S32-str/tc.t
[...]
ok 1 - simple
ok 2 - empty string
ok 3 - umlaut
ok 4 - accented chars
ok 5 - sharp s => Ss
ok 6 - lj => Lj (in one character)
ok 7 - method form of title case
ok 8 - tc only modifies first character
ok 9 - tc works on codepoints greater than 0xffff
ok
All tests successful.
Files=1, Tests=9, 0 wallclock secs [...]
Result: PASS
If you want to run the tests in parallel, you need to install a fairly recent version of the Perl 5 module Test::Harness (as above, we recommend version 3.16 or newer).
- CAVEATS.md