RakuAST Grant Report

The RakuAST project was a rewrite and redesign of the compiler frontend, i.e. the part that parses the original source code, figures out what the different parts are, does checks and optimizations and creates a low level representation which will then be turned into bytecode by the backend. When I applied for the grant a lot of basic infrastructure was already in place. Many simple programs would already run, e.g. you could define variables, classes, functions, create objects, call methods and a lot more. However Raku is a large language. E.g. there's not just methods. There are also private methods, meta methods, methods with fully qualified names (i.e. when you want a method of a specific base class), method calls where the name is determined at compile time (e.g. $foo."$bar"()), hypered method calls and even more obscure ways of calling code. These were all still left to do. The same was true for all other areas of the compiler. My method for attacking this was simple: one spec t ... Read full article.