blogs.perl.org

One more contribution, OpenAPI::Linter to validate and lint OpenAPI Specification. For more information, please follow the link:
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/openapi-linter

Only Paul and Aristotle this time.

We had a small amount of helpful feedback on the named signature parameters PR. Paul wants to merge by the end of the week for the purposes of inviting more feedback, assuming no issues are raised in the meantime.

[P5P posting of this summary]

In the last few months I have been learning Flutter and Dart and recently I saw a youtube video from our very own Perl Wizard Randal Schwartz ( Vibe-coding with Gemini CLI ) where he is exploring the use of Google Gemini to vibe code Flutter applications. Gemini Cli is a command line tool that gives you the power of Gemini AI right in your command line prompt. In the beginning of Randal's adventure with Gemini he wrote this AI prompt "review the app @youtube_watcher. Tell me the Good, the Bad and the Ugly." and AI delivered a very detailed response on what is and isn't working within the application.

After seeing this very detailed report I decided to do the same on ev-calc-pricing a perl dancer project I worked on and I was amazed to see Gemini work on a perl dancer project. At this point I realize that Gemini is capable of assisting coders in any language/ framework and it can provide insight on software engineering best practices for you application.

Available from the Wiki Haven.
I have still not had time to update CPAN::MetaCustodian, so it does not yet work correctly with the latest version of Perl.Wiki.html.

Introducing YaraFFI, minimal Perl FFI bindings for the YARA malware scanning engine.
For more information, please follow the post below:
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/yara-malware-scanner

All three of us attended.

• We touched on the recent discussion about the classification of modules included with the perl distribution. We agreed that the PSC and p5p need to do a better job of tracking which modules have active maintainers and who they are. Something like a dashboard would be useful for this, and we identified as a starting point that it would be good to have an up-to-date overview of dists, their maintainers, and whether they are active. Maintainers.pl probably already covers the list of dists but it would be useful to split the data out into a separate file so it could be used in other scripts, which could also populate records with additional data, outside of what Maintainers.pl needs, for their own purposes. For example a tool for querying PAUSE for the maintainers of dual-life dists and flagging deviations could check a custom field where known deviations (along with a comment) would be recorded, so as to not flag them.
• We had a somewhat surface-level discussion about the future of stdio in Perl. Leon has been thinking about this and intends to write a separate mail to p5p about it.

[P5P posting of this summary]

After a very long hiatus due to the triplet of work-vacation-work, we return to Part 3 of my AI assisted coding of a Perl interface to a foreign library.
I will not repeat the post on my Github pages Github pages, or the documentation of my MetaCPAN package Bit::Set which features a "vibecoding" section.
However, I would like to share the take home points from my exercise:

• I found the agentic bots to not be very helpful, as they entered these long repetitive and useless reflections without being able to fix the problems they identified when the build of `Bit::Set` failed.
• The "Ask" mode chatbots could generate lots of code, but with subtle mistakes.
• Success with porting test suites from one language to the other was highly variable, ranging from near perfect to outright refusal to execute a difficult task.
• On the other hand, the chatbot was excellent as an auto-complete, often helping me finish the structure of the POD and putting together the scaffold to fill things in.

We are moving full steam ahead. The Journals are not so easy to put out 2x a year we are finding, but the editing process for Issue #2 is moving ahead nonetheless. We are now collecting papers for inclusion for Issue #3. But our hybrid conferences are proving to be very successful endeavors. We hope you will consider submitting a Science Track paper or regular Perl talk to this 2 day hybrid conference in sunny ole Austin, TX, USA.

See more:

https://science.perlcommunity.org/spj/announcement/view/9

Class::Mite is getting better relatively as numbers shown in the post below: https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/bless-vs-class-mite

We finally managed to arrange our first regular meeting between the three of us.

• Largely we discussed strategy for the named parameters branch. We agreed to merge soon (so people start playing with it), just staying ready to back it out well before release, in case it proves not to be ready.
• In that context, we considered the situation with experiment warnings. We agreed that named parameters should be an additional experiment of its own, though it is an adjunct of another experiment – and we do not yet have established ways of dealing with such a situation. We want to think about how our experiment mechanism should be extended to cover such cases.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Get them at the usual place...

Twenty years is a long time in the world of software. That's how long it's been since I last updated my Perl module, File::Finder. But today, thanks to a bug report from a dedicated user, I'm excited to announce the release of version 1.0.0!

For those who don't know, File::Finder is a handy little module that gives you the power of the find command right in your Perl code. It turns out that it wasn't playing nicely with Windows, and it was high time to fix that.

It's a surreal and wonderful feeling to revisit code you wrote two decades ago and find that it's still useful to people. It's a testament to the power and longevity of Perl and the open-source community.

A big thank you to the user who took the time to report the bug and help me bring this module into the modern era. It's moments like these that make you appreciate the collaborative spirit of software development.

You can find the new, Windows-friendly version of File::Finder on CPAN.

#Perl #CPAN #SoftwareDevelopment #LegacyCode #OpenSource #ThrowbackThursday

[this message written with the assistance of Gemini CLI inside VSCode]

Graphic::Toolkit::Color 1.9 brought several big new features which I will write about when 2.0 comes out - just to sum up what changed since 1.0. This time I want to describe the internal changes, since this release completed an in-depth rewrite. So this will be about software engineering, architecture and coding style. TLDR: simple, clear, DDD, OO by composition and arg and a color space DSL!

Ongoing scheduling issues have meant we haven’t met all three together for a while, but today Paul and Leon found a time to discuss a few issues.

Dev point releases

5.43.3 just went out. .4 to .7 are accounted for, so we’ve a few months yet on that. Nothing for PSC to do for now.

OpenSSL progress

Leon has been building a replacement for Net::SSLeay - an XS wrapper of libssl. Eventual plan is that IO::Socket::SSL should be able to use that instead. Eventual intention is that it can be bundled with the actual core perl dist and get us ability to use https URLs from the in-core CPAN client directly.

We should have a technical meeting at some point to round up some of the interested parties. PSC’s involvement can just be keeping an eye on it, and seeing if it is on track to be included in (5.)44.

TODO: Plan a time and audience for said meeting.

Better categorization of core vs dual-life modules

Roles in Perl, implemented in native form with zero dependencies. Check out where the discussion ends up in the post below:
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/roles-in-perl

I recently refactored the multi-core benchmarking framework I've been using for my Perl CPU benchmark suite (Benchmark::DKbench) and released it as a separate module: Benchmark::MCE.

Why spin it out? Because the harness can do more: it can be used to write custom benchmark suites of any type, generate massively parallel workloads for stress testing, or run throughput benchmarks against services and APIs.

The exact scenario that prompted me was a comparison of Cloud SQL database instances. We wanted to see how a 16-CPU Enterprise Plus instance would compare to a 24-CPU Enterprise instance under heavy load. One way to do that is to write one or more functions that run randomized, typical/heavy queries (e.g. random searches for SpareRoom ads in our case), then use Benchmark::MCE to time them running on dozens of parallel MCE workers to simulate high load:

The 2024 Perl Community Conference videos are being sent out now. To get the early access, join our announcement-only email list at https://perlcommunity.org/science/#mailing_list.

You may also join the Perl Programmers Facebook Group, or if you're a member go there. A few days after the latest videos are sent to our exclusive mailing list, they will get set to the FB group.

Finally, you may monitor our Perl Community Subreddit, which will be the last place they are officially released to the public. We just dropped batch #2. We have 2 more batches for the 2024 PCC. Then we'll be doing it all over again for the 2025 Summer PCC we just had in July.

And if you see anyone else releasing them on any other platforms, note this is currently unauthorized!

Cheers, Brett Estrade (OODLER)

Only Graham and Philippe attended. We coordinated with Aristotle via chat.

We only met to discuss the mailing-list moderation and immediate actions
(which resolved to sending an email to them moderators, and another one
to the list).

We also talked about moderation in general, and got some ideas to discuss
with the next PSC.

[P5P posting of this summary]

The unary + operator is one of the most commonly used operators in Perl. Below is a post detailing a recent situation where I encountered it:
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/unary-operator

#!/usr/bin/perl

use 5.36.0;

# ------------------------------------------------

say 'Does priority say we print 2b or ! 2b?';

my($action_types) = qr/PAYMENT|SETTLEMENT|TRANSFER/o;

say "Action types: $action_types";

for my $action (qw/PAYMENT REFUND/)
{
say "Action: $action";
say "Case: 1. $action (1a): ", $action =~ $action_types ? 'Present' : 'Absent';
say "Case: 2. $action (2a): ", "$action (2b): " . $action =~ $action_types ? 'Present' : 'Absent';
say "Case: 3. $action (3a): ", "$action (3b): " . ($action =~ $action_types) ? 'Present' : 'Absent';
say "Case: 4. $action (4a): ", "$action (4b): " . ( ($action =~ $action_types) ? 'Present' : 'Absent');
say "Case: 5. $action (5a): " . ($action =~ /$action_types/ ? 'Present' : 'Absent');
say '';
}