* No separate types of bytestrings versus sequences of unicode codepoints.

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

And the original blog post from almost a year ago: https://dev.to/lizmat/towards-a-raku-foundation-3ne2

From a blog post, to a problem solving issues, to passing a lot of hurdles: The Raku Foundation is here!

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

The Rakudo implementation of the Raku Programming Language uses the MoarVM, which is pretty much a generic VM. All you need to do(TM) is write a grammar and associated actions to build the right bytecode out of the given Python source.

It also goes from source code to AST:

  $ 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!"),
            )
          )
        )
      )
    )
  )

> In the raku example, what if the elements were to be multiplied?

$ 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)

Yeah, no thanks.

My instincts about raku were always that perl was too fiddly, so why would I want perl 6, and this isn't doing anything to dissuade me from that position.

Nothing stopping you from creating a L10N::LA module :-)

You mean like:

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

or

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

?

FWIW, cannot reproduce on Safari 18.6 on MacOS 15.6.1

Technically, no. As Rakudo is not a programming language, and Perl6 is a deadname.

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

Plenty of people then. Okay! I meant Raku, yes.