librasteve

This is one of the leading members of the Raku community and the original founder announcing the establishment of The Raku Foundation (a break away from the TPRF)

great post … thanks for all the work

personally I would like to see a compare and contrast between the Intel 8087 (built around an full width adder), 287 and the Weitek 1167 (built around a full width mac and barrel shifter)

as you note, all these parts were pushing the transistor limits of their day

PS. and the Inmos T800 had a log shifter … so a compromise between those extremes

glad you mention https://slangify.org … we are pulling together a set of tooling and example DSLs to make this kind of LLM-DSL combination super easy

whatever you do, don’t search urban dictionary for DSL definition

good - I have resorted to a config setting to suppress these bad icons on Tahoe

Any experience out there wrt LLMs generating DSL code (your story or hard data both welcome)?

Also I posted on this topic https://rakujourney.wordpress.com/2026/06/08/slangify-the-ca... keen to hear real world feedback on this angle.

but, the earth is flatter than it looks … since, according to GR, spacetime is convex around it gravity well

This is an awesome achievement. I am not so sure how you made it 4x slower than C … since it strikes me that you have 1:1 mapping to asm, perhaps vector benchmarks are unfair for this kind of comparison.

To those who criticize use of LLM in projects like yours, I demur - where there are productivity gains to be had, LLMs can make small niche FOSS projects like yours more viable and less drudgery.

I prefer a concise language btw:

  say “hello, raku”;
  say (0, 1, *+* ... *)[10];

This is more by way of saying let 1000 flowers bloom.

(The main strength of Raku is its built in Grammars https://slangify.org)

i like the rust page example…

  use std;
  import std::io;

  fn main() {
    for i in [1, 2, 3] {
      io::println(#fmt("hello %d\n", i));
    }
  }

here’s what the Raku site should look like:

  say “hello $_” for ^3

this homepage has snippets to die for https://raku.org/

This looks like an interesting project, coming from another minority language - Raku - I can see how dogfooding like this is a great way to try and help Julia break into the Python hegemony (yawn) esp. in academic circles. otoh, I am not sure that a pure play Julia notebook thing is long run better than a pure play Python thing (Jupyter ofc).

Yet notebooks are a vital angle for any scripting language. So I guess I would like to see a language neutral notebook platform with pluggable kernels. Meantime Jupyter does that pretty well and, with Raku Inline::Python support for pip modules can be a lot of fun with a Raku kernel, especially with LLM chatbook use cases.

https://raku.land/zef:bduggan/Jupyter::Kernel

lol … fwiw we are as bemused by the situation as anyone (well, I am, I can’t really speak for anyone else). My take is that Raku (née perl6) got the worst of all worlds … divided the perl community, was 15 years in the making, got dragged into the reputational suction as the unreconstructed perl Titanic sank. All the same, it’s a wonderful reimagining of all the great things of perl from all the community RFPs and the genius of Larry and Damian and co and fixes most of the negatives and is now there and steadily improving and what’s not to like!

red face … thanks for the correction … I guess I should have looked at https://moarvm.org

thanks! I have done a bit of work on Raku + Polars (ie the Pandas rewrite in Rust). This has been hampered by Rust lack of a binary FFI - so it has ended up running into unsafe keyhole surgery territory. My current feel is that we would need to move down to Apache Arrow and build a bunch of FFI / MOARMVM level scaffolding to keep it fast. Maybe take a look at COW at the same time.

Is any of that already lying around in Zig?

There has been some speculation about porting the Raku backend (Meta-Object Aware Runtime Virtual Machine - MOARVM)from C to Zig. For example the wider set of Zig Hash options could be a big optimization.

Since you ask, the front end is self hosting in NQP and with the ripening RakuAST project increasingly in Raku Grammars. The new AST (6.e.PREVIEW) will bring much better introspection and high level optimization handles. So the potential to refactor/rewrite the VM for substantial speed gains is wide open.

Anyway those with skills and interest are welcome to join the -Ofun at https://raku.org/community

yeah - it's the symmetry breaking

I just wrote a tutorial on using DSLs with LLMs. Curious to hear feedback on this approach - for those who have already taken this path, please share your experience- good and bad.

balls! (golf balls)

I would “up” this a little and say that scripting languages “should” be slow in comparison to low level compiled languages. We want eg. runtime evaluation of multis dependent on type. For (cod) example:

  subset Even of Int where *  %% 2;
  subset Odd  of Int where * !%% 2;

  multi foo(Even $i) { ‘fizz’ }
  multi foo(Odd  $i) { ‘buzz’ }

  say foo for ^9;

the clue is in the name

this “square wave” effect is driven by interest rates … when the bank rate is very low investors will tolerate high level of gambling on growth (ponzi-like). as soon as money will grow anyway in the bank, then investors demand actual RoI

DSLs are a secret weapon for LLM effectiveness because their human-readable, domain-centric structure constrains both the training set and model outputs, making them significantly easier for LLMs to generate accurately.

I was (pleasantly) surprised by Claude Code doing Raku - also with a limited training set (~2000 Stack Overflow, a bunch of Rosetta, 2,500 modules). I put this down to the quality of the code for the core community who are all frankly uber-gremlins.

I just did a side-by-side with Claude Code Python vs. Raku for DSL use ... https://slangify.org if you are interested.

Many here propose replacing Python with more performant, but less familiar languages - mostly Rust, Go. But I find the argument that the AI - HUMAN interface is the most important. A simple version of this is “no, stick with Python if that’s what you know”. A more interesting version is “use this new found AI leeway to move up the abstraction level”, “try something more expressive and human oriented”, “make a DSL and parser that suits the domain (and focuses the AI)”. Despite being a minority language, Raku is ideal for these aspects (esp with built in Grammars and general kitchen sink repartee) and works surprisingly well with most popular LLMs.

oh dear, my phone was stolen - Morgan McSweeney

Here are some:

  - https://raku.org (dog-fooding)
  - https://harcstack.org
  - https://cragcli.info

It's fairly early days ... but a couple of other Raku community sites are taking it up.

For web stuff, I enjoy https://htmx.org

so Go + Templ + HTMX (aka the GOTH stack)

Or, if you prefer more of a power tools feel, then HTMX and Raku in functional style (https://harcstack.org) maybe to your liking. Which I call the Crotch Rocket of the programming world.

this is a big frustration for web code what with HTML, CSS, JS, PHP all spread about

https://htmx.org/essays/locality-of-behaviour/ is a good fight back as exemplified in many stacks, eg https://harcstack.org