After Rakudo commit negative start positions are disallowed: $ perl6 -e 'say index("xxy", "y", -1).perl' Failure.new(exception => X::OutOfRange.new(what => "Position in index", got => -1, range => "0..3", comment => Any), backtrace => Backtrace.new)
Tested in S32-str/index.t and S32-str/rindex.t I'm closing this ticket as 'resolved'.