We are happy to announce that there will be a Perl and Raku Devroom at FOSDEM 2027.

*We would like to invite you to submit a presentation about your favorite Perl or Raku topic.

Summary

• Call closes on: November 27th 2026 at 23:59 UTC (00:59 CET)
• FOSDEM dates: Saturday January 30th - Sunday January 31st
• Speaking date: Sunday January 31st
• Where: Brussels, Belgium, at ULB Solbosch
• Submit a talk: FOSDEM Pretalx CfP -- choose the “Perl & Raku” track
• Full event info: FOSDEM
• All speakers are expected to be present at FOSDEM to give their talk.

About the Perl and Raku devroom, and FOSDEM

FOSDEM is the largest gathering of Open Source developers and contributors in Europe. The conference features typically more than 700 talks, for more than 10,000 attendees, organized by the FOSS communities themselves. This is a great venue to learn about both the technologies and the people behind them! If you rely on Perl and Raku, or Open Source tech and communities in general, FOSDEM is the best place to be.

A few small matters turned up this week.

There are a few issues sitting around that we’d like to roll into a 5.44.1 release, being various bugfixes that have accumulated. We’d like to get a more streamlined process for making these releases. We hope to have a more concrete proposal soon.

The recent PR (#25042) to fix the SV flags associated with PL_sv_zero looks like a good idea that we should accept anyway, even though it doesn’t actually fix the JSON serialisation problem with JSON::XS. That module may be beyond our ability to influence.

We think that renaming util.h to something less likely to collide with OS headers (such as perl_util.h) is a good idea as a first step. This may likely lead to a wider task of moving all of our internal headers into their own subdirectory, to neaten up the structure and avoid the problem recurring in future, but this first step will at least help reveal any potential problems with doing that.

[P5P posting of this summary]

NetAddr::IP 4.080_08 is on CPAN as a trial release. If you use NetAddr::IP, install it and run your code against it before 4.080 goes stable.

The last post here covered 4.080_05. Since then, 4.080_06, 4.080_07 and 4.080_08 changed constructor, parsing, comparison and method behaviour, and they added new4() and NetAddr::IP::Count. In almost every case, the behaviour changes handle bad or ambiguous input better: they reject it, return undef, or croak with a clear error instead of producing a wrong address. The 4.080 series is also relicensed to the MIT license. This post lists the API changes you may need to check in your code.

For every detail, see the Changes file on MetaCPAN.

New API

I’ve been working again on faster integer factoring in my Perl module Math::Prime::Util::GMP. My latest work grew into msiqs, a standalone factoring program that is competitive with specialized software I've been recommending for years, such as YAFU.

But first, what does this mean for Perl users?

The upcoming Math::Prime::Util::GMP 0.55 replaces its old quadratic sieve with a new implementation. For the difficult numbers where this algorithm is useful, factoring gets considerably faster, uses less memory, and works at larger sizes. You get those improvements through the familiar Math::Prime::Util interface:

use Math::Prime::Util qw(factor);

my $n = "861718837045131266076605675795055735226483972739042530561207";
print join(" * ", factor($n)), "\n";

Math::Prime::Util automatically uses its optional GMP backend when installed. Passing a large integer as a decimal string is fine; you don’t need to construct a Math::BigInt object just to factor it. The factoring code is written in C, with GMP handling the large integers.

Stats::LikeR: R’s statistics toolkit, native in Perl

I got tired of writing CSV files just so I could run a t-test in R.

My data was nearly always in Perl already. I’d parse a log or a lab export, clean it up, dump it to disk, open R, run t.test, and paste the p-value back into the Perl script that built the report. Every one of those hops is a chance for a column to get reordered or an NA to turn into a zero without anyone noticing.

Before: Perl, CSV, R, copy by hand, Perl. After: one Perl script.

Stats::LikeR is what I wrote so I could stop doing that. Version 0.34 is on CPAN now.

In short:

All three of us discussed the recent issue GH24977 about how the behaviour of interpolation in regexp quotes changes under use strict in latest blead perl. We feel this is a change that needs more thinking and adjustment before it reaches a stable perl release.

Aside from that, the mailing list and github issues tracker have both been rather quiet of late, so there aren’t any other major issues that require our attention.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Dancer2 2.3.0 is on its way to CPAN. It adds support for the HTTP QUERY method, fixes a pair of JSON serializer bugs, and closes a small information leak in error responses.

If your app speaks JSON, you want this one.

Why 2.3.0 and not 2.2.3? QUERY support adds a new keyword, and a new keyword can collide with code you already have. Details below.

New: HTTP QUERY support

QUERY is a newer HTTP method that's safe and idempotent like GET, but carries a request body like POST. It's meant for searches and lookups that are too big or too complicated to cram into a query string. (Yes, it's the thing a lot of us have been faking with POST for years.)

Two Approaches

This blog post was inspired by the Task 1 of Weekly Challenge 396. Let’s start with the actual wording of the task:

You are given two arrays of integers, @order and @friends.
The @order (size n) contains every integer from 1 to n exactly once. The @friends contains IDs sorted in strictly increasing order.
Write a script to return the array containing IDs in finishing order.

Not clear? Let’s look at an example:

The Perl Community is busily preparing for the Winter 2026 PCC, December 17 & 18 in Austin, TX, and remote—including Perl’s birthday! We’re planning on yet another great lineup of in-person and remote presentations.

Join our announcements-only email list for conference news and video releases.

In the meantime, thanks to a few generous souls, we’ve hired a video editor to help us release the conference recordings. The first two videos from Winter 2025 PCC are up:

• A Perl File System Based on FUSE — Mohammed Zia
• Gary McKinnon & the Biggest Perl Hack — Mickey Macten

More recordings are coming over the next couple of weeks, including:

• sealed.pm: Compile-Time Method Lookups — Dr. Joe Schaefer
• Bits & Pieces: Perl Library for CPU & GPU Architectures — Dr. Christos Argyropoulos
• Matplotlib::Simple: Plotting Quickly in Perl and SimpleFlow: Automating & Reliabilizing Computational Workflows — Dr. David Condon
• PAGI: The Perl Asynchronous Gateway Interface AKA PSGI 2.0 and AI Perl Committee: Introduction to Perl MCP — John Napiorkowski

• Perl.Wiki V 1.57
• cpan.metacurator.tree.html
• cpan.metacurator.help.html (New!)
• Mojo.WIki V 1.27

• CPAN::MetaCurator V 1.34
• CPAN::MetaPackager V 1.05

Since 2012 I have been saying in public that Perl needs applications, and that CPAN by itself is not the killer application. These apps never arrived, and the usual answer was "use the right tool for the job". In a time when AI reimplements whole software suites, the question is worth asking again. Our answer is PetaApps: a NAS, a hypervisor, a software-defined network, a mail server and a backup server, on one platform, built on Rust and Perl. None of it is finished. All of it is under way.

URI::PackageURL 2.26 is on CPAN.

URI-PackageURL implements two specifications that are becoming central to software supply-chain security:

• PURL (Package URL, standardized as ECMA-427): a uniform way to identify a software package across ecosystems (pkg:cpan/URI-PackageURL@2.26)
• VERS (Version Range): a universal notation for version ranges (vers:cpan/>=2.00|<2.26)

It ships with two CLI tools, purl-tool and vers-tool, and depends only on core modules.

What's new

The new cpan PURL type

The main change is support for the updated cpan type definition in purl-spec.

NetAddr::IP 4.079 was released in 2016 and has sat there since. I have started working on it recently, and 4.080_05 is the fifth trial release since. It is on CPAN now, and the tarball is ready for you to install!

Most of what changed is a matter of course: about a hundred fixes to bugs and to documentation that had drifted from the code, and a set of three breaking changes that fix behaviour the documentation said should not happen. NetAddr::IP is now MIT licensed, was dual licensed under GPL v2 or the Artistic License, and deprecations collected under one heading are going in version 5.

The XS build

Get them at my Home Page's Wiki Haven.

This is the first version where ChangeLog[12] are included in the JSTree, so there are still some tiny cleanups to do...

pperl 0.6.25 is released; the changelog has the complete record: https://perl.petamem.com/docs/eng/changelog/index.html. Until now pperl showed what it could do: a feature here, a module there, a benchmark won. This release is measured against what others need. The internal libraries and software suites of PetaMem and PetaJoule run on pperl in full, and of the 500 distributions the rest of CPAN stands on, all but three pass - 99.9% of the CPAN River by weight.

By GoPerl — Architecture, Perl, Go & Node.js for companies that need reliable and scalable systems.

In today’s modern systems, especially in web development, new stacks and new developers grow up with the idea of async/await—in other words, asynchronous systems. Many adopt the concept without fully understanding what lies behind it. The simplest goal is clear: make your application feel fast and responsive, without leaving users waiting.

Let’s take this into the enterprise world, where speed, scalability and resilience define technological competitiveness. One concept that immediately enters the conversation is job queues. Behind every high‑performance system, there is always a subsystem responsible for processing heavy tasks without blocking the user experience.

Within the Perl ecosystem, that subsystem has a name: Minion.

Minion provides a modern job queue with SQL persistence, real asynchronous execution and a simple distributed model. This makes it a more robust and easier‑to‑operate alternative compared to Redis‑based solutions like Sidekiq or BullMQ.

Introduction

I have uploaded to CPAN some tooling modules which allow Perl documentation to be authored as Markdown files - or Docbook XML articles - then merged into source files as POD. They can also then be published as HTML to static sites such as Github pages or Cloudflare Workers.

TL;DR here is an example of the end result - documention for the Cloudflare::API module created from the doc/ directory in the GitHub repository and POD for the command-line tool created from a Markdown file in the same repository.

Perl Documentation

Documentation can be tedious - despite knowing how important good documentation is, and that it can make or break open-source software. Nothing is worse than trying to run "man Some::Module" (or "perldoc Some::Manual") and getting nothing back.

POD is the "linga franca" of the Perl world for a good reason - it has stood the test of time, is completely integrated into the Perl ecosystem and is an excellent format for creating manual pages for Perl modules and scripts.

A few days ago, an article by Flutter developer Hammad Tariq caught my eye: "Rendering 10,000 Machine State Changes on a Timeline Without Freezing Flutter".

It was a solid piece of profiling detective work. Hammad was building a high-density timeline view in Flutter representing 10,000 machine state transitions. But every time the dataset loaded, the mobile UI stuttered and dropped dozens of frames.

Under a section aptly titled "The Original Sin", the author identified the culprit:

sorted.sort((a, b) => DateTime.parse(a.start).compareTo(DateTime.parse(b.start)));

Because sorting makes O(N log N) comparisons, sorting 10,000 items was triggering over 215,000 redundant calls to DateTime.parse() right inside the comparison callback, blowing past the 16ms frame budget and freezing the screen.

To fix the frame freeze, Hammad introduced a clever optimization: map each item to a temporary helper object holding the pre-computed timestamp, sort the list using that cached value, and unwrap it:

(yes, that's a lot of twos!)

Dancer2 2.2.2 is now headed to CPAN. This is a small bug fix release.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a crash when using class-method serializers (GH #1837)
• Fixed test failures in gen.t affecting CPAN Testers and Debian builds (GH #1843)

Documentation

• Updated a contributor's name in the documentation (PR #1844)

There are no security fixes, enhancements, or deprecations in this release.

Thanks to David Precious and Nova Patch for their contributions.

As always, bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub.

Jason, on behalf of the Dancer Core Team