TPF at OSCON 2017

The Perl Foundation is excited to have a booth at OSCON again this year. As part of our booth information and outreach we've put together a summary of some of the activities in the Perl world from 2016.

Perl 5

The Perl 5 teams continued the steady release of new versions of Perl 5 with the release of 5.24 in 2016. This release included enhancements to regular expressions, Unicode 8.0 support, and security updates. A full list of changes for all perl versions is available in the perl history part of the perl documentation.

Looking forward, the upcoming 5.26 release includes numerous speed improvements (including speedier subroutine signatures), Unicode 9.0 support, indented here-documents, and many bug fixes.

The following events supported continued development on the Perl 5 ecosystem:

• Perl QA Hackathon
• Perl 5 Core Hackathon

Perl 6

In 2016 the emphasis in Perl 6 development has been on stability and performance enhancements. An example of this is a 2.5x speed improvement for a common task such as reading a CSV file with the pure Perl 6 version of Text::CSV. Also, memory usage has dropped significantly in 2016, making it easier to run Perl 6 on smaller devices. Using Perl 5 modules (e.g. from CPAN) using Inline::Perl5 has also become 2x as fast. Check out Perl 6 Weekly if you want to keep up-to-date on Perl 6 development.

In addition to Perl 6 development, brian d foy held a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund writing “Learning Perl 6” in the same tradition as O’Reilly’s successful “Learning Perl”.

Over $1 Million in Grants Awarded

The Perl Foundation passed a significant milestone in 2016: since the Foundation’s inception, we have awarded over one million dollars in grants! With the help of our generous supporters, we have made a significant impact on Perl. That legacy continues with these grants awarded from last year:

Perl 5 Grants

• Maintaining Perl 5 (Tony Cook)
• Maintaining the Perl 5 Core (David Mitchell)
• QA Hackathon Travel (Ricardo Signes)

Perl 6 Grants

• Perl 6 Release Goals (Jonathan Worthington)
• Perl 6 Performance and Reliability Engineering (Jonathan Worthington)
• Update on JavaScript Backend For Rakudo (Paweł Murias)

Traditional Grants

• RPerl User Documentation (Will Braswell)
• Test::Simple/Stream Stabilization (Chad 'Exodist' Granum)
• Test2 Manual (Chad 'Exodist' Granum)
• Standardization, Test Coverage, and Documentation of Perl 6 I/O Routines (Zoffix Znet)
• Improving the Robustness of Unicode Support in Rakudo on MoarVM (Samantha McVey)

This work is made possible by our many sponsors, including:

• Booking.com
• cPanel
• Craigslist
• Bluehost
• Signature Information Solutions LLC
• Grant Street Group
• Assurant Mortgage Solutions

MetaCPAN

MetaCPAN is a search engine for CPAN, the Perl module hosting system (http://metacpan.org). It has brought a huge amount of new metadata to perl modules since its launch in 2015. This year, the team completed a project to update nearly all of the components of the site and version the API. Details of the project are available in blog posts from the team.

CPAN itself continues to be a reliable resource for providing access to over