Welcome, weary traveler. It is known that you come bearing earnest questions and we congratulate you on managing to arrive here, on this precipice of doom. Not a brutal doom, nor even a fearful doom, but a doom as in a fate open to you.
See, your arrival here stands foretold. In fact, we built this very precipice in anticipation of you. Since we expected you to come from many different paths, we laid out long and sturdy carpets in untallied directions.
There has been a long-standing contrast observed, that Perl was the Hobbit to Raku’s Lord of the Rings. While somewhat amusing, I have always felt that this analogy failed in two key ways.
First, it fails to give Perl’s legacy its due. Perl’s presence is felt in the deepest firmaments of our operating systems. If it must play the role of a ‘smaller sibling,’ using the Hobbit as reference just feels too under-stated. It’s an amazing book, but especially with today’s often almost anti-rose-tinted perspective on Perl’s contributions on everything from build systems, bug report tools, testing frameworks, centralized distribution of modules, even to our very understanding of DNA… I think we can do better by Perl.
Second, comparing Raku to the Lord of the Rings… while it is an indisputably impressive work of singular imagination, this comparison nevertheless fails to describe the sheer, nigh unbelievable audacity that the project — the dream — that is now known as Raku actually represents.
I’d like to take this opportunity to explore a new spin on all of this. If Perl 1-4 represents the Hobbit, then Perl 5 (now, at-last-and-once-again known as simply Perl) is the Lord of the Rings. Perl has certainly gone to Mount Doom and back. And when it finally arrived back home, it found that its position in the world had been irrevocably changed.
That is also to say that Perl represents an achievement of similar scope and magnitude as to Tolkien’s genre-defining series. Nothing that came after it ever looked or felt quite the same. But none would ever again dare to arrive without (hash)maps in place!
But where does that leave Raku? Raku is Dungeons and Dragons. D&D’s very existence hinges on works like Lord of the Rings (see Appendix N for the larger context of influences). Dungeons and Dragons is also certainly audacious: it’s essentially an audacity amplifier! Whatever scope you can envision, you can make possible. That fits pretty well into our famous position: “make the hard things easy and the impossible things feasible.” (How’s that for audacity? Also, this is my personal paraphrase. Use responsibly!)
All you need is a group of like-minded people who agree to both take it seriously and have a whole lot of fun while doing so.
It is understandable if you feel a bit trepidatious. It’s a known crossover effect from the fact that you may have already made the choice, though it is only now presented before you… beyond the threshold, into the darkness of the deep… some greater force urges you on, compelling you to strive forth and make a place for your name in the Great Hall of
CONTRIBUTORS.
A megadungeon is a specific type of role-playing “adventure path” designed to be a permanent fixture of a larger campaign. Player characters can dip in and out of the megadungeon as they please, exploring it to whatever depth feels appropriate. But a key feature of a megadungeon is that it (almost) always has another level, another staircase leading into seemingly-unknown-yet-also-clearly-already-ventured-upon corridors and chasms. (Maybe I just took the first step in creating my own heartbreaker RPG system called Chasms & Corridors?)
The “almost” qualifier is that every megadungeon does have a last level, at least as designed. You can theoretically get there. But the chances of Real Life allowing it are minimal. And so the comparison to D&D also fits the historical record of Raku, especially if you consider core development to be a megadungeon.
It is not uncommon for our core developers to reach a point in their journey where they find they must turn back in order to find their way again. Their paths may or may not ever venture back into Mount Camelia, but the marks they left remain and endure and shape the experience of all who come after. We are all so very grateful to have had the time with you that you chose to share, and wish you nothing but the best in all of your new adventures.
At the risk of belaboring this metaphor, I’ll leave on a note of highlighting the stratification of core development in this context. Work can be done by those lovely creatures blessed with darksight (read: C skills and compiler mind) at the MoarVM level. The fact that they can get into the lowest areas of Mount Camelia and emerge with treasure is a testament to either their fortitude, their foolhardiness, or both.
Meanwhile, there has been a years long project to create an entirely new compiler front-end, essentially building a brand new way of existing and traveling throughout the megadungeon that is Raku core development. And all the while, progress and improvements have been made to the implementation of the core setting.
With regards to the new front end: We are close, maybe very close. But even so… for those of us still delving the nooks and crannies of our respective levels, we know that once we get there, it will be as it ever was: just as we put the last of our current efforts to polish, we will inevitably see some glimmer in the dark to once again drive us on.
You will then, as always, be welcomed to come along, for a spell or for a song, as we carve a dream of it.
This post is dedicated to all of us who have put heart, mind, and/or life into this audacious dream of ours. We love you, we miss you, we are happy for you, wherever you are.
Happy holidays!
Raku Advent Calendar 