Originally published at Perl Weekly 774
Hi there,
I know you all are patiently waiting for the release of Perl v5.44. Recently I joined the mailing list of perl5-porters. You get all the latest update straight in your inbox. This is where I found out, the v5.44 would be out end of next month if everything goes as per the plan. I get excited during this time of the year to see what is new added to the core class feature. I am still waiting for the support of creating roles. I am also aware there are other high priority features in the list. No pressure to Paul Evans and his team, we are happy to see the progress in the language under your guidance.
Well you don't have to wait for the big release to get your hand dirty. For me, I am busy exploring things like Big O Notation, JSON Web Token (JWT), OAuth2, gRPC. There are plenty in the pipelines too.
If you are looking for something new then you should check this out, Aspire in Perl. While going through the post, I came across another gem, OpenTelemetry SDK for Perl, thanks to JJ Atria. It's going in my TODO list. One day, I will take a closer look.
Web development in Perl has seen it all since the CGI Era (1990s). First came PSGI/Plack, the middleware revolution, followed by the rise of frameworks like Catalyst, Dancer2 and Mojolicious. Dave Cross has written a very detailed post about The Long Road From CGI To Containers.
Plenty of posts this week to keep you busy all day, enjoy.
--
Your editor: Mohammad Sajid Anwar.
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Articles
This week in PSC (225) | 2026-05-18
Announcement of 5.43.11 dev release is the hightlight of this week update.
The Camel Cometh
Find out the story behind the support of Perl in Aspire. It is very inspiring and honest story. I wouldn't say, I understood everything but it created an interest inside me. You must checkout yourself.
The Long Road from CGI to Containers
What a journey CGI had. The post reminds me some of my past encounters with CGI, like printing html tags inside the script. Although, it is not recommeded these days in raw form for web development, I am still one of the maintainers of CGI::Simple.
Big O Notation
This story is for all non-computer science background techie who have yet to crack the mystery of time/space complexity. I really enjoyed the journey and I am sure you will love it too.
JWT with Dancer2
JSON Web Token (JWT) is something that came up in discussion many times in the past but I never had chance to look at it in details. Last week finally I found time to get to the bottom of it. This post details how and what is it actually.
OAuth2 with Dancer2
Now OAuth2 is nothing new to many techie but I stayed away from it for so long. I found it too complex topic and kept delaying to explore. Now that I have seen it inside out, it seems like a walk in a park.
Strategy Design Pattern
Every time I talk about design patterns, I get excited like a little boy who found his favourite toy. Whenever I feel down, I pick up my book, Design Patterns in Modern Perl and read a design pattern. My all time favourite is Singleton design pattern. How about yours?
REST vs gRPC
gRPC was something I wanted to explore for a long time. In this post, I shared my investigation so far. I know, I have only scratched the surface and there are still plenty to explore.
CPAN
App::Test::Generator v0.39
Plenty of bug fixes and enhancements in this release as shared by Nigel. The Changes file list the details.
Grants
Maintaining Perl 5 Core (Dave Mitchell): April 2026
PEVANS Core Perl 5: Grant Report for April 2026
I noticed the mention of optional chaining PPC in the report. If it is what I think it is then I am super happy that it is in safe hand now. I can't wait to see the end result. Thank you Paul.
Maintaining Perl (Tony Cook) April 2026
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The Weekly Challenge - 375
Welcome to a new week with a couple of fun tasks "Single Common Word" and "Find K-Beauty". If you are new to the weekly challenge then why not join us and have fun every week. For more information, please read the FAQ.
RECAP - The Weekly Challenge - 374
Enjoy a quick recap of last week's contributions by Team PWC dealing with the "Count Vowel" and "Largest Same-digits Number" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy.
Largest Vowel
This is an excellent post describing a different way of using Raku. It demonstrates the effectiveness of Raku by utilising such features as 'gather/take' and powerful sequence grouping to make complex string processing simpler than ever before. In addition to being a great way to learn about Raku, this post is also an opportunity for developers to see how the author has reused existing code to produce a clean, modular program.
All Vowels Are Equal
The post demonstrates an extremely sophisticated work to the challenge. It uses advanced Perl's regex features, look-ahead assertions and the (?{...}) code block.
The Weekly Challenge 374
The code provided is a highly legible and clear way of handling the challenge resolution process, making use of commonly used data structures to simplify complex string processing tasks. It is very pleasing to see this clean, parallelised logic presented in both Perl and Python, which helps improve the maintainability of the two codes and provides a great deal of educational value as well.
Perl Weekly Challenge 374
This fantastic example on how to reduce large scale problems into highly efficient solutions using half-lines of codes, showcases Perl’s ability to allow us to write complex, yet very succinct, solutions of difficult problems. It also serves as a great example of how to use regex backreference in a creative way, using regular expressions to locate and manage repeating patterns while minimising the amount of code required.
Hey, won’t you play…
This post showcases some great, multi-lingual solutions to this week's challenge by providing clean and idiomatic code examples in Perl, Raku, Python, and Elixir. Packy explains the thought process and the differences between lookaheads in regular expressions. This makes the article a great teaching tool for discovering how various languages solve equivalent algorithm problems.
Lots of repetition
Peter provides a well-reasoned and pragmatic assessment of the problem at hand and presents readable, non-complex code. He broke up all vowel characters in the string into separate chunks prior to applying a sub-substring check which provides an excellent example of performance optimisation by successfully processing very long strings with a relatively low number of vowels in that string to produce an acceptable processing time.
The Weekly Challenge - 374: Count Vowel
This post takes an insightful and interesting view of the vowel-counting challenge by making an interesting analogy of programming logic and music theory from the 18th century. The "Prefix/Cell/Suffix" model is a unique and clear technical explanation of the 'use of bitmasks for tracking vowel completion', making the bitmask solution to this challenge feel elegant and well thought out.
The Weekly Challenge - 374: Largest Same-digits Number
In this post, you'll find a brief yet highly efficient method of solving the "Largest Same-digits Number" challenge. The method relies on a single-pass regular expression as an elegant means to perform pattern matching with maximum effectiveness, and exemplifies good understanding of the high performance features of Perl.
The Largest Count
The post show how to solve problems using both Rust and Perl languages. It also demonstrates how one can take advantage of the strengths of each language (type-safe collections in Rust vs concise string searches in Perl) to carry out the tasks, but do so efficiently.
Vowels and numbers
The post explains the need to clearly specify the task requirements for the "Largest Same-digit Number" challenge. It shows that an ambiguous requirement has caused different solutions to develop and serves to remind us that "coding to the examples" can be just as important as "coding to the original problem description."
Rakudo
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Great CPAN modules released last week.
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