blogs.perl.org

This is my first post in this Blog...
I will write about Perl

My presentation will look at coding agents from Anthropic and z.ai with the following questions:

How (well) can coding agents support Perl code?

What differences are there between the models?

How can I get agents to write good code?

Hope to see you there:

https://act.yapc.eu/gpw2026/

All three of us attended.

• We spent a long time debating how to proceed with Karl’s proposal to restrict legal identifier names for security. No consensus emerged, and we resolved to ask the question in a venue with wider reach than p5p.

• We are faced with an absent maintainer of a CPAN-upstream dual-life module, namely Encode. We discussed this situation in general terms but did not get beyond the question itself – partly due to time constraints. We agreed that this seems likely to occur more often in the future and that p5p will need an agreed way of dealing with it, but what that should be is too big a topic to be contained within the PSC meeting format.

• There are multiple PRs currently in flight, some of them rather large, including Paul’s magic v2 and attributes v2. We decided that we are too close to contentious changes freeze in this cycle to merge those.

[P5P posting of this summary]

As announced two weeks ago, I'm starting a series on dev.to about "Beautiful Perl features". The intent is to touch people outside of the Perl Community and try to convince them that Perl is not the dreadful language they imagine, by showing them facts, not opinions.

• https://dev.to/damil/beautiful-perl-features-introduction-to-the-series-b6a
• https://dev.to/damil/beautiful-perl-feature-blocks-2o4

At this occasion I also started a new hashtag #beautifulperl - do not hesitate to reuse it in your own publications whenever appropriate.

Of course I'm happy to get feedback, either through online comments here or on dev.to, or through private email.

Many thanks to the reviewers who helped me to polish this material!

Best regards, Laurent

One of my colleagues, let's call her M, has a rather deep dislike of toes. At least that is the conclusion I would draw from the frequency with which she steps on them. It is not that she is malicious, but as she strives towards an unachievable level of perfection casualties are inevitable. Her frustration with one less enthusiastic or less intelligent (I like to think I am just "more chilled") is also just as inevitable. Suffice to say, I have to wear emotional boots with steel toe caps to meetings where she attends wearing her ideological stilettos.

While I am suitably armoured, other colleagues are less protected. Ash, (the poor fellow) providing a verbose and detailed outline of a problem he was facing, stood no chance.

Data Structure

"If you can't decide," M said helpfully, "you have either got insufficient data, or insufficient competence...which is it?"

We're happy to have Abigail present at the German Perl Workshop 2026!

Sharding a database, twice richtet sich an Alle und wird in English gehalten.

There comes a time in the life time of a database, the database takes too many resources (be it disk space, number of I/O transactions, or something else) to be handled by a single box.

Sharding, where data is distributed over several identically shaped databases is one technique to solve this.

For a high volume database I used to work with, we hit this limit about a dozen
years ago. Then we hit the limit again two years ago.

In this talk, we will first discuss how we initialized switched our systems to make use of a sharded database, without any significant downtime.

Initial set posted on our Reddit page (https://www.reddit.com/r/perlcommunity/). Please direct all comments there.

As we did last time, we are giving early access to members of our low-volume mailing list. You may join by going to https://perlcommunity.org/science/#mailing_list.

You should be planning to attend the Summer PCC 2026 (Austin, TX / Virtual), which, as consistently promised, will take place on July 3rd and 4th. A CFP and paper call will be available soon.

Videos from this past Winter PCC (December 17–18) will be made available after our Summer PCC.

Calls to Action:

• join our mailing list
• think about submitting a Perl 5 talk or SPJ paper candidate to the Summer PCC in Austin, TX
• visit The Perl Community YouTube Channel for 2024 PCC videos (click here)
• consider supporting the Science Perl Journal; Issue #1 is still available at Barnes & Noble: https://science.perlcommunity.org/spj

2026 is sure to be as productive and busy for The Perl Community⁺ as 2024 and 2025.

Cheers, Brett Estrade (OODLER)

⁺The Perl Community is a 501(c)(3) organization based in Austin, Texas, USA. It is dedicated to the advancement of Perl 5 through its committees, including AI Perl, Perl::Types, and the Science Perl Committees, as well as publications like the Science Perl Journal. (Registered DOI Prefix: 10.63971)

My first interaction with Mojo and WebSocket. I have documented my experience in this post: https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/mojo-with-websocket

With Leon at FOSDEM it was only Paul and Aristotle this week, but the discussion ranged widely.

Sydney Perl continues regular meetings with our next in February

Please join us on Tuesday 24th Feb 2026 at Organic Trader Pty Ltd.
Unit 13/809-821 Botany Road Rosebery

6:30pm to 9pm.

Chances are folks will head to a nearby Pub afterward.

I will talk about my 5 years working at Meta Platforms and 6 months at Amazon Inc. specifically contrasting their engineering culture, and generally discussing what Google calls an SRE culture. Contrasting my experiences at Big Tech to "Middle Tech".

Getting there:

Come in the front door marked
"Konnect" then take the first door on the right, and up the stairs to
Level 1.

Mascot station + 20 minute walk or 358 bus to Gardener's Road if you
don't want to walk so far.

Or Waterloo Metro station + 309 bus to Botany Road after Harcourt Parade.

Get them, as always, from my Wiki Haven.

Tech trio embrace in harmony: Dancer2, DBIx::Class::Async and HTMX.
For more information, please follow this link: https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/dancer2-dbic-async-htmx

Last year, I wrote that the total cost of a Perl Toolchain Summit is in the order of 50,000€. It's all covered by sponsors and attendees (and the leftovers from the previous years).

We're now preparing the Perl Toolchain Summit 2026, which will be held from Thursday, April 23rd until Sunday, April 26th, in Vienna, Austria.

Today, I'll briefly explain why we need sponsors for the event, and propose a new way to think about sponsorship to our corporate sponsors.

Hi fellow Perlists,

Now that I am retired, I have a bit more time for personal projects. One project dear to my heart would be to demonstrate strong features of Perl for programmers from other backgrounds. So I'm planning a https://dev.to/ series on "beautiful Perl features", comparing various aspects of Perl with similar features in Java, Python or Javascript.

There are many points to discuss, ranging from small details like flexibility of quote delimiters or the mere simplicity of allowing a final comma in a list, to much more fundamental features like lexical scoping and dynamic scoping.

Since I'm not a native english speaker, and since my knowledge of Java and Python is mostly theoretical, I would appreciate help if some of you would volunteer for spending some time in proofreading the projected posts. Just send an email to my CPAN account if you feel like participating.

Thanks in advance :-), Laurent Dami

"Perl is slow."

I've heard this for years, well since I started. You probably have too. And honestly? For a long time, I didn't have a great rebuttal. Sure, Perl's fast enough for most things, it's well known for text processing, glueing code and quick scripts. But when it came to object heavy code, the critics have a point.

Download from the usual place, my Wiki Haven.

I've released a new version of SBOM::CycloneDX with support for the OWASP CycloneDX 1.7 specification (ECMA-424).

This release includes the new elements introduced in 1.7, with a focus on:

• Enhancements to Cryptography Bill of Materials (CBOM)
• Citations: references and sources for evidence/metadata
• Intellectual Property Transparency: references to associated patents (number, jurisdiction, link, assignee) for compliance / due diligence needs

New experimental "SBOM::CycloneDX::Lite" interface: A lightweight module designed to generate BOMs with a simpler API, using the most common CycloneDX properties.

Examples included in the distribution (use them as a starting point to build your own applications/tools that generate BOM files):

• "x509-to-cbom" : generates a CBOM from an X.509 certificate
• "rpm-to-sbom" : generates a SBOM from installed RPM packages (on RHEL-based)

The goal of this module is to help the Perl community generate BOM files more easily, improving security and compliance across the ecosystem and making the software supply chain more transparent.

SBOM::CycloneDX is available on CPAN / MetaCPAN: https://metacpan.org/pod/SBOM::CycloneDX

Related projects: - App::CPAN::SBOM - https://metacpan.org/dist/App-CPAN-SBOM - Modules::CoreList::SBOM - https://github.com/giterlizzi/perl-Module-CoreList-SBOM

I’ve built mojoeye, a tiny Perl app to run system and security checks across our internal Linux hosts:

https://github.com/GwynDavies/mojoeye

It’s built for environments where time, attention, and continuity are scarce. Checks are plain Perl scripts, the server is a single-file Mojolicious::Lite web app, and each host runs a small single-file client that reports back. There’s a short tutorial that gets someone productive in about 30 minutes.

Thank you, Mojolicious!

MIT licensed; currently tested on Debian- and Fedora-like systems.

— Gwyn

An Analysis of The Perl and Raku Foundation's 2024 Finances

In October 2024, I published an article analyzing the financial situation of The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF). Since then, I have left the board, and my life is now largely unrelated to Perl. I no longer have insight into TPRF's internal decision-making but I got a few suggestions to continue, so this article again analyzes TPRF's finances using publicly available data for the 2024 calendar year. There is an unavoidable delay between when nonprofit tax returns are filed and when they become public.

Executive Summary

• Assets at end of 2023: $200,215
• Revenue in 2024: $86,845
• Expenses in 2024: $188,037
• Assets at end of 2024: $101,525

Revenue: A Positive Turn