Release blocker triage continues. Several more blockers have been resolved. We identified no blockers among new tickets but did consider #23346 and may ship it even if we do not consider it a blocker.
We discussed some feedback regarding the fix for CVE-2025-40909 and requested that the patch be amended. A perldelta entry is also missing before we can ship the security releases.
We discussed who will do then stable release and when. RC1 will be published by Philippe Bruhat on June 20th.
We went over the scalar-context pair constructor proposal. Changing the fat arrow in general is out of the question and we don’t think any other proposal is likely to work.
We went over the 2-arg open proposal. It seems mostly trivial to do and worthwhile as well, but the real complexity is in the implicit open done by readline. We will outline our thoughts on the thread.
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 tenth post introduces you to what I call closures in XS.
Datastar brings the functionality provided by libraries like Alpine.js (frontend reactivity) and htmx (backend reactivity) together, into one cohesive solution. It's a lightweight, extensible framework that allows you to:
Manage state and build reactivity into your frontend using HTML attributes.
Modify the DOM and state by sending events from your backend.
I added Perl for Datastar with Datastar::SSE, for the backend reactivity bits.
Hi, you my have noticed our "ad" showing up on on metacpan.org - many thanks to David Cross for helping us out there! You may have to hit "refresh" a few times to see it (but not too many, please! xD)
Now, as much as we'd love to see everyone in Austin, TX on July 3-4, and it's sure to be a lot of fun, the PCC is a hybrid event, meaning we do permit remote attendees and worthy talks.
We already have many exciting and highly technical Perl talks. But we are selfish and we want more. It is okay if you even repeat a talk you've given elsewhere. We offer several levels of talks, including lightning talks, which we all know is how most of us got started. Do not be afraid! :-)
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 first post introduces the fundamentals of creating an perl object from XS.
This week CVE-2025-40909 was assigned, for an issue we were already tracking (GH #23010). We coordinated during the week to get a fix merged (GH #23019) before 5.41.13. Thanks to Vincent Lefèvre for the report and Leon Timmermans for the fix. During the meeting we discussed getting out security releases for this soon.
We caught up on release blocker triage. We are tentatively all clear: all previously identified release blockers are now resolved, and there were no new blockers in recent issues and pull requests – except possibly a 32-bit Windows build issue we are not yet certain about. We are keeping an eye on that.
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.
We caught up with new issues and pull requests without finding any new release blockers.
We went over the state of the perldeprecation and perlexperiment POD pages. We found that perlexperiment does not yet reflect the change in direction regarding smartmatch. Other than that we saw nothing to do.
We went over our options regarding readline again at length. We concluded that we are not yet sure about the big across-the-board change to I/O functions, and are definitely too far into the release cycle to undertake a fishing expedition. But we don’t want to leave this problem entirely unaddressed during this cycle, and the change proposed by Tony Cook is a strict improvement, even if only a minimal one. So we decided to ship it, possibly with a slightly different implementation that we may suggest.
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.
AWS S3 Encryption isn't as complex as I thought initially. I had fun playing with it. You can give it a try too. Please check out the link below for more information. https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/aws-s3-encryption
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 ninth post introduces you to C data types and how to expose them in perl.
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. :)
