Rakudo Star

Rakudo Star 2016.07 is a useful and usable production distribution of Perl 6 which supports the latest Christmas Perl 6 (6.c language version).

Installing from binaries

Windows users can directly install the most recent 64 bit or 32 bit MSI of Rakudo Star from the download directory

Mac users can directly install using the most recent .dmg from the same location

http://rakudo.org/downloads/star

Docker users can directly install with docker pull rakudo-star

Installing from source

People on UNIX-like systems can try out Rakudo Star from an extracted source tarball.

You will need recent versions of perl, git, make and gcc. Also a basic familiarity with UNIX.

For full instructions see http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo/

A quick start for Linux/Mac/BSD/Cygwin etc. follows:

% wget http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/rakudo-star-2016.07.tar.gz
% tar xfz rakudo-star-2016.07.tar.gz 
% cd rakudo-star-2016.07
# perl Configure.pl --gen-moar --prefix /opt/rakudo-star-2016.07     
# make install

Rakudo Star 2016.07 Errata

• Windows port: NativeCall modules may not work depending on compiler (differs depending on whether mingw or MSVC and whether 32 or 64 bit). Also panda needs to be invoked like "panda --notests install Zef" to work since it may not call prove correctly. That example also installs a panda alternative called zef which should fully work.
• Linux and Mac ports: no specific issues known currently

Tracking Rakudo Source Changes

Developers interested in tracking the latest versions to help with Perl 6 itself are recommended to consider rakudobrew.

For full rakudobrew instructions see https://github.com/tadzik/rakudobrew

Introductory Material

Perl 6 Introductory course (PDF slides)

Perl 6 Introduction

Learn Perl 6 in Y minutes

The "Language" section of the Perl 6 Documentation

Perl 6 Ecosystem

Modules extending Perl 6

Panda Module installer

Zef Module installer