Perl Foundation News

This is very nice. Between this and Booking.com's (disclaimer: I work there) 
€100,000 donation just over a month ago TPF is really getting on track for having large corporate sponsorship from organizations who recognize how valuable Perl is for their infrastructure.

I talked to some of the TPF people at Booking.com's donation event and they expressed desires to have more paid-for developers working on the Perl 5 core, and they're really gearing up as an organization for making that happen.

One thing of note for those unfamiliar with the Perl community: Notice how both of these big grants are earmarked for Perl 5 development, not Perl 6 development.

By now Perl 6 is viewed as best an interesting research project by organizations using Perl 5 in production.

I don't mean that as a comment to detract away from what the Perl 6 developers are doing, but to point out that it's a very different pattern than what's happening with the next generation of Python, Ruby, PHP etc. runtimes.

1. http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/01/bookingcom-sponsors-100000-to.html

Just to clarify, Dan Wright is the former treasurer. He retired from the TPRF board back in 2020 (https://news.perlfoundation.org/post/board_update_tpf_treasurer).

But to answer the bigger question, yes, I think this was a bit weird. I was also on the board for a while, and I think we did not do a good job of reporting on and monitoring financials. This was one of my frustrations with the organization, and part of the reason I stepped down from the board (though there were other, bigger, reasons not related to the board as well).

In fact, I had made the same points as Makoto does in his blog post maybe 1-2 years earlier in a board meeting. We were running a constant deficit and we didn't seem to have a clear plan for what we would do if that continued.

This article predates the resignation of SawyerX (due to a lot of the abuse and misery heaped on him), who was the Perl release manager (aka "Pumpking") that was in charge of Perl 7.

The short version of it was that there was a bit of a power play by people who felt ignored and wanted a bigger part of what was felt to be an important development.

SawyerX goes into his a bit in a talk from 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1H9yKf8BI0

This has resulted in a new (2024) code of conduct so that leadership can proceed without the previous sorts of verbal assaults effecting things again. https://news.perlfoundation.org/post/new-standaards-of-conduct

Unfortunately, the performance of regexes has not been improved much in the past years, that is true and on the radar. Yes, it can be improved (very much indeed).

Most other subsystems of Rakudo Perl 6 have been improved significantly, some by orders of magnitude. And then there's work on the basic runtime of MoarVM and its JIT that will benefit all programs running on MoarVM.

The Perl Foundation recently approved another grant for the JIT: http://news.perlfoundation.org/2018/11/september-2018-grant-votes.html about http://news.perlfoundation.org/2018/10/grant-proposal-moarvm-jit-comp.html

> and I'm not seeing any interest in making it work on mobile

An accepted grant to make it easier to compile perl5 on Android is currently in progress: http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/05/grant-application-improving-cr.html | http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/09/improving-cross-compilation-of.html.

Also there is Perldroid - http://code.google.com/p/perldroid/

And I assume SL4A is still available on Android? - http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

And for many years I had perl5 running on my Symbian phone :)

Python is just far more popular.

RubyGem:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/malicious-rubygems-packages-used-in-cryptocurrency-supply-chain-attack/amp/

Perl CPAN
https://news.perlfoundation.org/post/malicious-code-found-in-cpan-package