Two weeks ago we announced PetaPerl 0.6.0. Today, 0.6.8 goes live at https://perl.petamem.com. Again, the version has no hidden meaning, but if you insist, you can call this the "дурак Go Home" edition. The headlines: pperl has now perl 5.44 as compatibility target because it follows the current stable perl5. The benchmark suite that produces our numbers is released, so you can see what the numbers are on your machine. DBI works, with native database drivers - connect to your PostgreSQL or MySQL database with an unmodified use DBI; script and no driver installation. And there is now a daemon that lets repeated runs of a script skip compilation entirely: each run forks an already-compiled image and goes straight to execution.

Over twenty-five years ago, when PetaMem was still in its infancy but the use of Perl for its NLP/NLU systems was already a given (Natural Language Processing / Natural Language Understanding - we did not dare to call it AI back then), slightly before the 5.8 era and in a still-young SMP environment, I envisioned a perl that would autoparallelize. That is: dispatch your code onto the available CPUs, automatically. The idea was not mine. I had seen it sometime in the nineties at the CeBIT computer fair, at the SGI booth, where their C compiler was doing exactly that.

The vision evolved into a wish, and the wish, refined over the years, into a resolution: should PetaMem ever have the resources to fund the R&D team this would need - realistically at least twenty people, or five Jonathan Worthingtons - we would do it. 2025 was a remarkable year for us technology-wise, and when Christmas came, the decision was made: requisition said twenty … or fifty “people”, and build an autoparallelizing perl with a JIT.

PetaPerl was born.