Originally developed within the Parrot project, the Rakudo source code repository was split from the project in February 2009 so that it could be developed independently, although there were still many dependencies at the time.

Subsequent releases have used codenames based on Perl mongers groups.

[5] The name "Rakudo" for the Raku compiler was first suggested by Damian Conway.

[6] "Rakudo" is short for "Rakuda-dō" (with a long 'o'; 駱駝道), which is Japanese for "Way of the Camel".

The term "Rakudo" was also chosen to distinguish between the name of a language implementation ("Rakudo") from the name of the language specification ("Raku") – any implementation that passes the official test suite could call itself "Raku".