Fixed in Raku. You either have a string (Str) or a bytestream (Blob).

* Wherever there's strings in any non-trivially-sized real-word Perl 5 project, there is utter irreversible and irredeemable mojibake.

No mojibake in Raku.

* No canonical way to do object-orientation. (cf. blessed objects, Moo in different versions, and different conventions around how to use them) -- This stuff should be easy in 2026. Perl makes this easy thing really hard.

Raku has single object / type system.

* Regexes suck. Their brevity is a nice circus stunt for a computer science audience, but unless you follow very particular patterns for composing them from ergonomically named constants, etc. etc. (which "in the wild" I rarely see), they are very unergonomic.

Raku regexes allow arbitrary whitespace, can contain comments and are composable.

Grammars are collections of tokens / rules / regexes that can be used to build an AST, and actions that can take that AST and build another data structure of it. A grammar is used to parse Raku itself.

Grammars can be subclassed or have rules / regexes mixed in (slangs).

* The Perl 5/CPAN ecosystem has been left to rot and is no longer safe for consumption.

The Raku ecosystem, albeit much smaller, is growing and actively maintained: https://raku.land

https://dev.to/lizmat/a-year-later-a-trf-1lh0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48541123

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320921

Points: 9

# Comments: 1

  $ raku -e 'say Q|say "Hello World!"|.AST'
  RakuAST::StatementList.new(
    RakuAST::Statement::Expression.new(
      expression => RakuAST::Call::Name::WithoutParentheses.new(
        name => RakuAST::Name.from-identifier("say"),
        args => RakuAST::ArgList.new(
          RakuAST::QuotedString.new(
            segments   => (
              RakuAST::StrLiteral.new("Hello World!"),
            )
          )
        )
      )
    )
  )

$ raku -e 'say (0, 1, 2, * × * ... )[^10]' # for readability (0 1 2 2 4 8 32 256 8192 2097152)

$ raku -e 'say (0, 1, 2, * * ... *)[^10]' # for typeability (0 1 2 2 4 8 32 256 8192 2097152)

    my $a of Int = 42;
    say $a;  # 42

    my $a of Int = "foo";'       
    # Type check failed in assignment to $a; expected Int but got Str ("foo")

?

But there are indeed plenty of people doing projects with the Raku Programming Language.

Maybe not the one that was originally planned. But that was only a real possibility if Perl 5 would be able to get rid of its XS addiction.

Ask yourself: how many of the up river Perl modules are Perl only?

say (pi/pi).^name; # Num

    sub EXPORT() { Map.new: "&frobnicate" => &sum }

Note that the EXPORT sub can also be a multi, if you'd like different behaviour for different arguments.

use Foo::Bar:ver<0.1.2+>:auth:api<2>;

would only work if the at least version 0.1.2 of the Foo::Bar module was installed, authored by "zef:name" (basically ecosystem + nick of author), with API level 2.

Note that modules can be installed next to each other that have the same name, but different authorities and different versions.

Imports from modules are lexical, so one could even have one block use one version of a module, and another block another version. Which is handy when needing to migrate date between versions :-)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682751

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I really wish more people would use Raku :-) Because it is all built in there already! :-)