The Annual Perl Toolchain Summit 2025 -

Introduction

The Perl Toolchain Summit is an annual event where around 30-35 people are gathering to work on toolchain related tasks. The topics are the Perl Authors Upload Server, MetaCPAN, CPAN clients, Testing and Coverage modules, Smoketesting Perl, CPAN Security, Cyber Resilience Act, Module Dependencies, and many more.

This year it took place in Leipzig, Germany from May 1-4.

It’s a mix of discussions, pair programming and presentations. Like in the last years, all attendees were in the same hotel where the conference was happening, so during those four days a useful discussion can start any time. It’s crucial to be in the same room(s) for many attendees.

This year, my employer SUSE was a Silver sponsor. Thanks!

Since I have been organizing this event in 2015 in Berlin with Andreas König, I have attended multiple times.

This time I helped organizing a little bit. The main local organizer, Daniel Boehmer, had no experience with this conference, so I was helping with my experience, suggesting what kind of venue we need, creating TODO lists, some correspondence with the hotel.

The French Perl Mongers, mainly Philippe Bruhat and Laurent Boivin, were organizing the financial stuff and the event itself, regarding inviting people, topics, scheduling.

Below I write about what I worked on at the PTS, but you can also check out the blog posts from other attendees and the Results wiki page.

At the event itself I had enough time for some coding. Daniel had everything under control and provided us with everything we need.

YAML::XS

My main project was bringing YAML 1.2 compatibility to YAML::XS.

I started this already at SUSE Hackweek 24.

Another issue was that YAML::XS has been using package variables for configuration, which can be changed from every place at any time in a program.

So I copied the whole functional interface to a new Object Oriented interface. The functional interface will work as before.

After the hackweek there were some leftover issues, which I worked on at the PTS.

One was fixing a segmentation fault, which was caused by a race condition between an exception handler and the DESTROY method.

The other one was matching special values like booleans, null and numbers. I had been using a call to Perl and a regular expression, but this is way too slow, so I ported this to checking character by character in C. This was taking the most time, but now the new interface is almost as fast as the functional interface.

After getting the approval from Ingy I released version 0.904.0.

I will write another post going into more details about YAML::XS.

YAML::Syck

I helped Todd Rinaldo with a little issue in YAML::Syck.

Other

I attended the talk by Paul Evans about what’s new in Perl 5.42.

I learned that with Sublike::Extended it is possible already for older perl versions to write subroutines with named arguments.

Chad Granum gave us a little informal talk about a new ORM he is working on, which can be an alternative to DBIx::Class.

The Annual Perl Toolchain Summit 2025

Introduction

YAML::XS

YAML::Syck

Other

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