Ask HN: Are you using Raku? Pros / cons?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36922692

by fuzztester • 3 years ago

10 4 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Question inspired by starting to watch this: Raku for Beginners, at TPRC 2023:

https://youtu.be/eb-j1rxs7sc

colomon• 3 years ago

I've been actively using Raku for work for 13 years now. (Okay, we didn't call it Raku yet at the beginning.)

Pros: - Wonderfully expressive and powerful - The best glue language I've ever worked with - Indented heredocs (I think Perl 5 has this now? But Raku's had it for a decade, and it's made a number of my scripts vastly more readable than their Perl 5 equivalents.) - Great community that responds quickly to questions

Cons: - Every few years one of the platforms I've got it running on gets far enough behind that the module manager stops working with it, and I've got to install a fresh version on that platform

Most recently, on Saturday I wrote a script to valgrind a batch of files whose name starts with a string you provide, carefully recording any valgrind errors detected. 37 lines of clean code, easy to write, and hugely useful for my current project. Have had it running more or less continually for the last 24 hours...

librasteve• 3 years ago

I have greatly enjoyed raku for several years.

Pros: can whip up a quick one-liner (raku -e instead of bash), then grow it to a CLI command (with no boilerplate to handle args, help), then refactor that to simple OO when it gets bigger (instead of Python) and then to composable Roles when it becomes more complex ... at any point can apply just the right amount of Types to maintain clarity and control. oh and built in deep unicode, functional coding (function composition, lazy lists, pure functions...), grammars and better regex, easy use of perl5 and python modules and concurrent (hypers) are all there when needed

Cons: compilation & execution can be a bit slow - often better code structures (lazy execution) the correct use of precompilation or AST macros can compensate for that

2colours• 3 years ago

Oh yes, Bruce Gray was a major influence for me as well a couple of years ago. He often participates in the "Raku Study Group" meetings as well - these are very broad and informal meetings every second Sunday but around the end, Bruce almost always brings up some Raku (sometimes Perl) solutions for the weekly challenges from https://theweeklychallenge.org/. In case you are interested, the repo of the meetups: https://github.com/doomvox/raku-study

Back to the topic. I picked up Raku a couple of years ago and I mostly use it as a better shell.

The pros are that you can really quickly and swiftly deliver CLI automation tools and scripts; the language has a unique but very practical regex syntax, you have very rich tools for string manipulation and you have good utilities to "drain CPU" if you are willing to spend more resources to make something faster (e.g easy multithreading for operations). Also, the language is very pleasant to use, it makes you feel very clever and powerful.

The cons cannot be neglected, however, the biggest problem probably being the performance and stability of the only actually working compiler, Rakudo, and its most functioning bytecode VM, MoarVM. The rich string-processing system and regex engine can be surprisingly slothful if you have vast amounts of text, same for precise bigint and rational computations (which are the default). Not many people understand Rakudo (and especially the VMs) enough to work on bugs or performance improvements, and there are not many low-hanging fruit remaining. Considering this, I'm sad that there has been little strategy regarding getting new maintainers, or having a release strategy besides "we will not change anything that might break code, and just release new compiler versions every couple of months".

Also, I don't know how much this is a con for you but Raku is not a language you can just "learn", you have to explore it and always be ready for a new journey. It's a horizontally huge language with a lot of corner cases you probably cannot all keep in mind. I think I'm managing pretty well but it is definitely a risk; you should probably either find a small subset you are comfortable working with and stick to it, or be okay with exploration using whatever goes, from asking others and reading the docs to investigating the core library inside Rakudo (which is not as bad as it may sound but not everybody wants to do).

fuzztester• 3 years ago

Thanks to all who replied, guys.

Sorry, I forgot about my question for some time. Glad now that I suddenly remembered it, after seeing the answers.

I will read them in detail and then reply again if I have any more questions or comments.

Ask HN: Are you using Raku? Pros / cons?

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