We discussed the situation with readline and the filehandle error flag once again, starting over by revisiting the basic premise of the error flag. We think we now have a better understanding the overall situation, and this led us to a different approach about how to correct the overall situation, which we will outline as a proposal soon.
We have been wanting to revert #22465 but wanted to include a testcase that demonstrates why, which we hadn’t gotten to. In order to get this into the looming final dev release, we talked through what the testcase needs to look like, and will submit a pull request ASAP.
We caught up on new issues and pull requests for release blocker triage. We then reviewed the state of our current release blockers, some of which have been resolved, and one of which (#23026) we demoted based on our new understanding about the readline situation.
This post is adapted from my notes and recollection of the welcome speech I gave on the morning of Thursday May 1st, 2025, just before the initial stand-up.
This post is brought to you by Booking.com, the Diamond sponsor for the Perl Toolchain Summit 2025.
Booking.com is proud to sponsor the 2025 Perl Toolchain Summit as Perl continues to be a vital piece of our technology stack. We continue to rely on the Perl platform and tooling to serve millions of customers every day, helping them experience the world. Other than our interest in the evolution and modernization of the platform and tooling, the PTS is also a great opportunity to connect with the larger community and share learnings about how other companies and projects are tackling the challenges of working with Perl at scale (talking about both in systems and teams scalability), and how Perl fits an ever-changing and diverse technological landscape in other organizations.
So, what exactly is a Readonly variable in Perl? A readonly variable is one that, once assigned a value, cannot be changed. Any attempt to modify it will trigger a runtime error. This mechanism enforces immutability, ensuring that critical values remain untouched and are protected from accidental or unauthorised alterations.
The status of smartmatch came up. It is in a weird position where it used to be part of the language, then was retroactively declared an experiment, then deprecated and slated for removal, and now it’s no longer being removed – in fact we’ve added a feature for it, and not an experimental one either. The bottom line is that it’s not deprecated any more and not experimental either, but is now just a negative feature like indirect and multidimensional: it’s a mistake we made that will remain part of older language versions but will not be included in future feature bundles.
Release blocker triage continues as ever. Quite a few new issues came in recently, of which we identified two issues and one pull request as blockers. One of the issues and the PR pertain to the documentation of the status of smartmatch; we expect that there may be more inconsistencies in the documentation which will need to be ironed out.
I was inspired by Daniel Stenberg's recent article
Detecting malicious Unicode
to write
Test::MixedScripts,
which tests Perl source code and other text files for unexpected
Unicode scripts.
Why should you care about this?
There are Unicode characters in different scripts (alphabets) that
look similar and are easily
confused.
A malicious person could replace a domain name or other important
token with one that looks correct, for is associated with a host or
other resource that they control.
Consider the two domain names, "оnе.example.com" and
"one.example.com". They look indistinguishable in many fonts, but the
first one has Cyrillic letters.
Confusing Unicode might be added to your codebase through a malicious
patch submission or pull request. Or it could be added as text from an
email or web page that you copied and pasted into your code.
The module is easy to use, and defaults to testing for Latin and
Common characters:
A week ago I attended the 2025 PTS. For me it was a different PTS than the previous ones.
Firstly because it was my first PTS without Abe Timmerman. He was a regular in both the PTS (as maintainer of Test::Smoke), and of the Amsterdam Perl Mongers. In fact the last time I saw him was on our flight back to Amsterdam after the PTS in Lisbon last year. He was greatly missed.
Secondly, because of a question that Book asked at the very beginning of the PTS: how often we had been to the PTS before. I was one of the few who had attended more than 10 of them. Combined with the fact that several other regular attendees couldn't make it that meant that this PTS I spent more time than ever on helping others with various issues.
This is a hybrid (in-person and virtual) conference being held in Austin, TX on July 3rd-4th.
Did you miss your chance to speak or have wish to speak at the only available Perl Science Track (and get published in the Science Perl Journal)? Or maybe you just can't get enough Perl this summer??? Submit here ... or get more information on the PCC, including registration, special event registration, and donation links click here. For questions you may email us at science@perlcommunity.org or find us in the Perl Applications & Algorithms discord server.
The following lengths will be accepted for publication and presentation:
Science Perl Track: Full length paper (10-36 pages, 50 minute speaker slot)
Science Perl Track: Short paper (2-9 pages, 20 minute speaker slot)
Normal Perl Track (45 minute speaker slot, no paper required)
You may ask, where is the Winter SPJ or videos? We are working on them, promise! (it's a lot of work as some of you know. See also on Perlmonks and r/perlcommunity.
A Futility Closet post references a Perl "poem" over two decades old. I remember chuckling at it when it first appeared. Although it was published "anonymously", I'm pretty sure I know who wrote it. :)
This weekend I was once again privileged to attend the Perl Toolchain Summit (PTS). This year it was held in the lovely city of Leipzig.
The PTS continues to be my favourite technical event of the year. In part this is because I get to meet old friends and make new ones, but it's also because the summit really serves its purpose and I am able to make so much progress on the projects I have which belong in Perl's toolchain ecosystem.
PTS isn't a conference - it's a four-day working meeting. It brings together people working on toolchain projects to solve common problems and push the work forward. I did get a lot of work done, but that's not the main focus, for me anyway. I see it as a time to solve problems and plan the way forward, and for me PTS facilitates that in the most wonderful fashion.
Parenting aint easy. Certainly it is often something your kids teach you.
Even worse, it often starts with ”<INSERT_KIDS_FRIENDS_NAME>’s dad lets
him do <INSERT_CURRENTLY_PROHIBITED_ACTIVITY>”. In this constant battle
to shape your offspring into a model citizen, with the values you value,
and turning him/her into a self-sustaining organism, one applies tools
that enhance particular features, remove the superfluous or the undesirable.
Yes, this is a Mandelbrot fractal with three heads. No cloning needed, just multiply z to the power of four and proceed as usual. Well all this and so much more contains the latest release of Juliagraph 0.7. Intro here. All I wrote about the Cellgraph and Harmonograph applies again, more features, better controls and ... you can cruise the fractal by mouse.
One of my pleasures in perl is learning the C language again. Something about the perl language makes it easier to write C, but while sharing the same space in my brain.
So how can I write a trivial program to write exactly one GB (2^30) of data to disk?
first in perl- (Of course you prototype in perl!)
But since my c program is cleaner, here’s the C program
Many thanx to Shawn Laffan for testing this version on Strawberry Perl.
I test it on my Debian machine first of course.
It took Shawn and myself a number of attempts to make all the test pass under the 2 types of OSes.
With the Harmonograph you can create beautiful and individual images within a few clicks. It's painting by pendulum. I already gave here an introduction. So let me just explain what is new:
I started using DEV at the suggestion of Perl Weekly, and I was quite pleased with it - until I discovered that links to dev.to are effectively "shadowbanned" on several major platforms (Reddit, Hacker News, etc.). Posts containing DEV URLs would simply not be shown to users, making it impossible to share content effectively.
To work around this, I thought I would need a way to publish my DEV articles on my own domain so I could freely share them. There are some DEV tutorials out there that explain how to consume the API using frontend frameworks like React, however I don't enjoy frontend at all and I did not want to spend much time on that.
My solution was to get a simple Perl script that builds static versions of the articles, along with an index page. A Perl 5 script will run anywhere, including an old shared linux hosting account I still keep on IONOS, and I really like the speed of static sites.
