The Perl and Raku Conference is fast approaching! We will be in Las Vegas on June 24-28, (main conference June 25-27). We want more speakers, so we are reopening the full call for talks/papers/posters.

The new deadline is April 20, midnight Las Vegas time. (April 21 00:00 UTC)

Now that the eclipse is not a distraction, please consider submitting a talk (50 minute, or 20 minute) or a scientific paper or poster before that deadline! Link to conference website Speakers will be informed of talk acceptance by April 30. Whether speaker or attendee, we look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas!

Nota Bene: 20m talks, 50m talks, papers, and posters earn free admission for the presenter. Giving a Lightning Talk does not reduce the admission fee, but earns our appreciation and delight!

See the bugreport for details.

Crossposted from https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/1by46uj/pdl_2087_released_and_a_summary_of_a_year_of_pdl/.

A new release of PDL is out! It’s been about a year since I last posted on here about a PDL release (last was PDL 2.083).

A selection of changes since PDL 2.083:

• Diab Jerius reported that a previous change to [xyz]vals to return at least a double had a regression for code that requests an explicit type smaller than that. Fixed in 2.085.

  Diab Jerius also reported several other edge cases: 1, 2, 3 including a fix for vsearch.

  Also, Diab Jerius modularised the primitive ops tests which allows for faster parallel testing.

• Harald Jörg reported that large arrays would cause PDL::FFT to crash. Fixed by switching from the stack VLAs to heap allocation. Fixed in 2.085.

  While it is recommended to use PDL::FFTW3 instead, PDL::FFT is bundled with PDL for the cases where PDL::FFTW3 can not be easily installed.

• Bas Couwenberg reported and fixed a previously deprecated API in HDF4 which has now been removed and replaced. Fixed in 2.085.

  As part of the Debian release process, Bas Couwenberg reported a failure on i386. Fixed in 2.087.

• Shawn Laffan provided an improvement to PDL::GIS::Proj so that it would load correctly on Windows via Alien::proj.

• Po-Chuan Hsieh provided a build fix for FreeBSD on amd64. I also happened to talk to James E Keenan around the same time about PDL builds on FreeBSD so this was followed up by adding CI testing for FreeBSD. Fixed in 2.085.

• Ryan Egesdahl provided a fix for macOS Ventura which changed the location of GLUT headers. Fixed in 2.085.

• Eli Schwartz reported an upstream Gentoo bug when building with LTO that uncovered 64-bit issues in Minuit and Slatec Fortran code. Fixed in 2.086.

• @vadim-160102 reported several issues with stringification: 1, 2; one of which uncovered a bug in conversion of ulonglong to Perl scalar.

• Karl Glazebrook, @vadim-160102, and users from PerlMonks provided valuable reports in tracking down issues with dataflow https://github.com/PDLPorters/pdl/issues/461. Fix available in 2.086.

• Jörg Sommrey contributed improved typemap handling which allows for using the typemap definitions that are available in Perl’s default typemap. Available in 2.086.

• Ed has added many improvements to the PP code generator and internal API as well as several new functions. Please see the Changes file for details!

  Of note are several speed improvements that are inspired by Eric Wheeler’s note about the speed of sequence().

A full list of closed issues and PRs is here. Thanks to all the contributors!

There are also some things to report from the wider World of PDL:

• Jörg Sommrey has released a PDL interface to GLPK (GNU Linear Programming Kit) for mathematical optimization: https://metacpan.org/pod/PDL::Opt::GLPK.

• The PGPLOT distribution now incorporates PDL::Graphics::PGPLOT module that was in the PDL distribution. The dependencies remain the same.

• PDL::Graphics::Simple had some small updates to the drivers. This is preparation for splitting the backend engines to their respective backend distributions (not yet released) and defining an API version that the engines conform to.

• TPRC Talk/Science Track Abstract submissions deadline: April 5th, 2024 (23:59:59 UTC)
• Abstract acceptance emails sent: April 15th, 2024
• Draft full paper due: May 15th, 2024
• Draft full paper feedback emails sent: May 31, 2024
• Final full paper due: June 7th, 2024
• Final papers approved: June 15th, 2024

• Sumit a Science Track Abstract
• Submit a Regular TPRC Talk

• Dataflow bugs have been fixed (GH#461)
• Dimension-checking for inputs and outputs are now rigorous to stop accidentally writing to the same place several times (GH#445)
• PDL::Graphics::PGPLOT has been moved into the PGPLOT CPAN distro and out of main-PDL
• Speed improvements (GH#451)
• A 20-year-old bug in rangeb has been fixed thanks to jo37

Thank you to all those who reported bugs or unexpected behaviour, or ask why something or other isn't possible: you help make PDL better and better!

The IRC channel (#pdl on irc.perl.org) is a great virtual place to come and ask questions, or just watch the GitHub messages flow by.

Please give the new release a try and report problems.

The Perl and Raku Conference (formerly known as YAPC::NA) is going strong!

This year, we are celebrating 25 years, our silver anniversary, in the Silver State, Nevada! The main conference will be in Las Vegas on June 25-27, but there will be hackathons and possibly classes on the day before and the day after the conference (June 24th and 28th), so please consider joining us for the whole week!

The backbone of this conference has always been our tracks of "traditional" talks by community members and what we have come to call the "Hallway Track", the informal exchange of ideas and camaraderie that sparks new projects and fuels collaboration.

This year, we are pleased also to host the presentation of Papers and Posters accepted by the Science Perl Journal!

Go now to https://tprc.us/ to check out what is planned and to book a room (see link to Alexis Park Resort under "Location"). Rooms start at only $75 per night, so it’s worth booking early!

The best way to register for the conference is here.

Houston Perl Mongers presents:
Title: Introducing Intellexer::API
When: Thur March 14th at 6:00-8:00 PM CT (+6 UTC)
Where: (virtual, see below):
What: Josh Day (HAX) will discuss his new CPAN module Intellexer::API
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/920069702
Meeting ID: 920 069 702
Password can be found by running this statement or reading the comment. perl -e 'print +(0b1000100).((3<<2)*10).(010)."\n"' # 681208

• https://blogs.perl.org/users/oodler_577/2024/02/cfp-science-track-papers-needed-at-the-perl-raku-conference.html
• https://science.perlcommunity.org/spj/index#top

The Call for Papers for The Perl and Raku Conference 2024 is now open!

From the TPRF website, "TPRC 2024 is being held in Las Vegas, NV from June 24-28 2024." The organizing committe has a few surprises lined up -- there will be more information to come.

A serious vulnerability in Spreadsheet::ParseExcel has been announced.

“This library is used by the Amavis virus scanner that runs on Barracuda ESG appliances. An attacker can trigger the vulnerability to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable ESG appliances through parameter injection.”

No mention of specific version numbers or of response from the Perl community in any way. What would we expect to happen in a situation like this?

Yes, it's that time of year again, folks. The Perl Advent Calendar returns for 2023. Enjoy!

Today, three new perl versions have been released:

• 5.34.2
• 5.36.2
• 5.38.1

The main reason is two fixed CVE's:

• CVE-2023-47038 - Write past buffer end via illegal user-defined Unicode property
• CVE-2023-47039 - Perl for Windows binary hijacking vulnerability

CVE-2023-47038 is only relevant during the use of \p in regexes. This is only a problem if you accept regular expressions from untrusted sources.

update 2023-11-29: Now that the CVE's are getting public, I could add one link.

update 2023-12-02:

After a long time of work, the videos are finally available on Youtube. 20 presentations with a total of 14 hours of airtime review the three days of the workshop and you can watch the things you missed on site.

We would especially like to thank Lee Johnson, who made the recordings, and the presenters, of course, without whom the workshop would not have taken place. The support from our sponsors helps us make the workshop take place.

OTOBO
united-domains
Perl-Services.de Renée Bäcker
Geizhals Preisvergleich
PayProp

The recordings of the German Perl Workshop 2023 are organised in the order of the day in a playlist available at gpw2023.

We are planning the German Perl Workshop 2024 again and are already in the final negotiations. As soon as we have a place and date fixed, we will update this post and also make a separate announcement.