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.
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.
Over the past year, I’ve been self-studying XS and have now decided to share my learning journey through a series of blog posts. This third post introduces you to list context in XS.
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
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:
CVE-2024-56406 is published and has been addressed by new point releases. Please upgrade or patch your perl promptly if affected. We thank Steve Hay, Andreas König and Stig Palmquist for doing the heavy lifting, as well as Nathan Mills for discovering the problem, and Karl Williams for providing the fix. We re-/learned a number of old and new lessons about the handling of security issues, which we will write up as new process for the PSC, the Perl Security Team, and the CPANSec group, to be jointly reviewed and agreed at the looming PTS.
We started winnowing this release cycle’s pull requests for potential release blockers. We briefly reviewed all 72 pull requests and identified 11 of interest for a closer look.
We reviewed the 2 new issues filed since last week for release blocker potential and put one of them on our list for closer review. We then started a closer examination of the 20 issues we identified as candidate blockers. We got through 5 issues, none of which we considered blockers.
Over the past year, I’ve been self-studying XS and have now decided to share my learning journey through a series of blog posts. This second post introduces the fundamentals of type checking variables in XS.
Lots has been going on. All of us showed up, though Aristotle had to join late and Philippe had to leave early, so the meeting was short but productive:
We continued with the potential release blocker issue review and finished going over all 49 issues remaining at this time, of which we identified 11 of interest. There are now still 72 pull requests to review.
We agreed to include the new Perl logo in the next release, but don’t yet know exactly how and where. That should be sorted out on p5p, and we will kick that off soon.
We went over the latest point release news, where everything is finally on track. It is coming very soon.
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.
Preparations for the point release are now in full swing.
In relation to that, we ran into infrastructure permissions discrepancies that have cropped up due to an absence of onboarding/offboarding procedures. We need to address both the immediate and long-term issues here.
We started winnowing this release cycle’s issues for potential release blockers. Out of about 95 issues, we have so far reviewed half, of which we identified 8 of interest. Additionally there are 72 pull requests to review.
Now that we have set up our mbtiny configuration in the previous post, we can actually use it.
Minting a new distribution
Minting a distribution is trivial once you’ve completed the setup. It’s typically just a matter of calling mbtiny mint Foo::Bar. If needed you can override the global configuration at minting time (e.g. mbtiny mint Foo::Bar --license BSD).
Converting an existing distribution
You can also convert an existing distribution to App::ModuleBuildTiny. In most cases that requires just two things:
Years ago I wrote about a concise fork idiom. It turns out that it’s possible to do better than everything I discussed in that entry as well as the proposals in the comments.
I didn’t at the time appreciate a clever aspect of variable scoping in Perl:
use strict;
sub get_answer { 0 }
if ( my $answer = get_answer ) {
...;
} else {
print $answer;
}
