Change:
] }, { <del> "language": "perl6", </del> <ins> "language": "raku", </ins> "scopeName": "source.perl.6", "path": "./syntaxes/perl6.tmLanguage.json" }

Discussion:
<!-- Do Not Delete This! featurerequesttemplate --<!-- Please read our Rules of Conduct: --<!-- Please search existing issues to avoid creating duplicates. --<!-- Describe the feature you'd like. --Remove Perl6 from the set of built-in languages. Perl6 was renamed to "Raku" in 2019, so the current display name is wrong. Further, the syntax highlighting is outdated relative to the latest text-mate grammars. Removing Perl6 entirely would reduce this maintenance burden, and allow extension developers to iterate independently. There are many languages far more popular than Raku that require extensions to define the language configuration and syntax highlighting (e.g. Scala, Kotlin, COBOL, Fortran, Haskell, Erlang, Lisp, Scheme). If Perl6 is removed, then vscode would automatically prompt users to download the extension for Raku, which provides updated syntax highlighting and a language server. Example of incorrect syntax highlighting can be seen here where a user was using the old built-in "Perl6" highlighting instead of the updated Raku highlighting. GitHub's highlighting has also already shifted from using the old Perl6 grammars to using the newer Raku grammars as can be seen here: Thanks!
We don't often get complaints about the current Perl6 grammar, so I don't want to completely remove it as it is a better experience to have syntax highlighting built in. Instead of removing the existing Perl6 grammar, we could adopt a new, better, grammar. It looks like you have one: If it's ok with you once gets a few more installs I'd like to switch VS Code over to using as the built in Perl6 grammar. I'll also change the display name to Raku at that time.
Assigning to a later milestone to check back in then.
Sure, keeping Raku syntax highlighting sounds good too. However, I'd recommend tracking the upstream repo here , which is part of the official Raku organization . This is also the repo that Github/Linguist are using for Raku syntax highlighting. The file in the RakuNavigator repo is essentially , except converted to json. Once vscode has the updated grammar, raku name, and raku file associations, I will remove them from the Raku extension, and the extension will then have the language server as its primary focus. Thanks!
makes sense to me.

Unfortunately that repo hasn't had a commit in over 2 years :(.
The current perl grammar at has been more recently maintained then the grammar at I don't want to update to a less well maintained grammar. Transferring to the backlog to check in again later.
Hi , the Perl (Perl5) grammar is actively maintained in the textmate repo, but the Raku (formerly known as Perl6) grammar in that repo is unmaintained with a last commit of more than 6 years ago. The grammar in the Raku/atom repo is 3.5 years newer, and actively utilized by GitHub (via Linguist) as well. Although I agree with your concerns of the Raku repo not being updated since 2020. I can work with the Raku team to update that repo, and ideally make it more vscode friendly (e.g. convert files to and be more generic than an atom extension). Thanks!
hello, after the recent development of things, grammar is not only more up-to-date content-wise (which it had been previously as well, mind you) but it's more maintainable as well, after some renovation. Keeping it in mind that the renaming of the language has happened some 4 years ago, please consider switching to that grammar so that the Raku community at least gets a chance to take charge of presenting a consistent, more appealing vision.
thanks for the ping! I will try out the new grammar. One thing that we will need to consider is that the name of the new grammar is "Raku" and the old grammar is "Perl 6". The scopeName is also different: vs. . Changing this scope name might break extensions that rely on it.
I've tried out the Raku grammar. I'm seeing a lot of surprising coloring: The old Perl6 grammar is on the left, the new Raku grammar is on the right: <img width="1028" alt="image" src=""- The and $ on line 7 are not colored properly The on line 10 is unexpectedly colored the first letter of the $variable is always miscolored For now, we will not adopt the new grammar. I will just rename the current Perl 6 grammar to Raku.
Github Linguist uses the same highlighter data and does a third thing. Not sure what you are using or how they are handling the textmate json files.

All in all, I would be suspicious of the provided screenshots and how to get them. anyway, it's disheartening more than by a bit because that package is likely to never get updated, and as somebody completely unfamiliar with Textmate highlighters, I specifically worked towards making this package maintainable. Not "better" than an abandoned package that most people wouldn't want to read, based on some ad-hoc, hardly representative testing.
you can see how I tried out the grammar in this PR, which I created for transparency and to save the changes I made so that the Raku grammar can easily be adopted later if it's fixed: Having a sample file that we try the grammar out on is how we test all the grammars we depend on. We have a test that uses these sample files to easily tell what changed when we pull in updates to grammars. You can also see this in I suspect there is some difference in how GitHub Linguist's TextMate interpreter works (VS Code's is here: ). I am in favor of more maintainable, but we also can't give users a worse experience. If you want to try out the grammar in VS Code, you can easily create an extension and copy over everything that I put in the Raku extension in my PR.
I made a repo for testing the grammar with VS Code so you can very easily try it:
To verify: a new file and save it with the .raku file extension. that the language mode of the editor is Raku