Talks
*Kerrrrash!!!*
"Arrrgh!!" said Andrew.
"What's that?" asked a some-what startled reader.
"That's the sound of a barrage of super cool talks landing suddenly in time for The London Perl and Raku Workshop 2025, that is!" declared a well-hyped JJ.
"Well I never!" remarked an impressed reader.
YAARP (Yet Another Attempt to Rewrite Perl)
**This time it's personal.**
In August 2007, Matt Trout and I spent two days discussing Yet Another
Attempt to Rewrite Perl—both the language and its runtime. One idea stood
out from everything else and lodged itself firmly in both our minds.
After Matt's passing earlier this year, I dug through old IRC logs to find
that conversation and revisit those ideas. What I discovered surprised me:
Matt had already started building it.
This talk explores the crazy theories, early prototypes, and wild ideas
Matt left behind—and how they could become the foundation for a future Perl.
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Design Patterns with Modern Perl.
This session will explore how Modern Perl frameworks, Moo, Object::Pad, the experimental feature class, along
with Class::Mite (blessed class prototype) all simplify the implementation of classic design patterns.
We'll move beyond traditional bless-based OOP to demonstrate cleaner, more robust ways to build objects and apply patterns such as Singleton.
Through practical code examples, you'll learn how to write more maintainable and scalable Perl applications using contemporary tools and techniques.
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Building the new Raku Website
The new raku.org site was launched on 7th September, and is implemented 100% in Raku - combining HTMX, Pico CSS, Cro and the new Raku Air module.
This is a walkthrough of the architecture, with emphasis on composing clean and concise web pages in a functional coding style.
Will briefly show the load tests, Docker deployment and site analytics too...
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Two talks from the German Perl Workshop, now shared with our UK audience...
1) Processor Duplication
Lee says: "Some of the work we've been doing to deduplicate code in a critical part of one of our production systems, and the risks therein."
2) A Whistlestop Tour of Banking Interchange Formats
Working on backend banking integrations for almost 20 years, Lee has been "fortunate enough" to encounter most interchange formats. Now he gives a talk about some of the history, formats commonly found in the wild, approaches to parsing/creating files/messages, and the fun/gotchas encountered around all of this.
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Probably the fastest cache in the world today
Melian is a tiny C-based cache server that doesn't pretend to be a
distributed system, a graph database, or the next big data miracle
fad. It just serves database tables at ridiculous speed and does it
obnoxiously well. We're talking sub-millisecond lookups, atomic
dataset swaps, and zero-copy I/O. Think "materialised view meets
caffeine overdose."
It's read-only, automatically refreshes from MySQL/MariaDB, and was
built for people who want instant lookups, not instant consistency.
Perfect for reference data, routing tables, metadata, or anything that
changes occasionally but gets read constantly.
Oh, and it has a Perl client, along with C, Python, Javascript, and PHP clients.
The talk will cover the data sets in which Melian shines (and where it
doesn't) and how to use it - including under Kubernetes, if that's
your poison.
Time permitting, we could go into over-slides and talk about the gory
details of how to create a cache that beats even Redis by miles and
kilometres, if used correctly.
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A Slow Decent Into Madness
Paul says...
"I've been working on core language design for a few years now.
In this talk I'll take a look back at a few things we've already got,
what I'm working on now,
and finish with some discussions on where I might be aiming towards."
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Breaking the hegemony of English
Details to be forthcoming...
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An update on CPANSec
An update on the current efforts of the CPAN Security group and a call to action so you - yes, YOU! - can contribute.
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PerlOnJava: A Perl Distribution for the JVM
PerlOnJava provides a Perl distribution designed to run natively on the
Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It allows Perl scripts to integrate seamlessly
with Java-based ecosystems while offering familiar tools and modules for
Perl development.
The JAR package features a variety of Perl modules, such as DBI (with JDBC
support) and HTTP::Tiny (with https support).
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"WAAAAAIIIIITTTT!!!" cried JJ. "We cannot proceed willy-nilly, saying yes to everyone that submits talk proposals."
"What do you suggest we do instead?" asked Andrew.
"We'll collect them all like Pokemon, say we're 'considering' them, and then, when we're a metaphorical Pokemon Master, with enough to populate two full talk tracks....
we'll announce our second track all at once!"
"WOW!" said Andrew, impressed at least one of them seemed organised.
...another talk from the German Perl Workshop, now shared with our UK audience...
Introducing Humans to Development
Julien says: "I gave this at GPW 2025 in Munich. I think I would change a couple of things, but it should mostly work for a UK audience seeing as the story I tell happened in the UK. There already exists an English language recording from early this year in Munich."
Julien often speaks about training and hiring. This talk will discuss a strategy to deal with a technical intern, how to make the experience worthwhile for the intern as well as your business, and why you should do it.
PLUS!!! A Lightening talk!
I tried Android development
Julien says: "I wanted an app to do a thing. How hard can it be, right? We're going to see how hard it was, and what I think Kotlin and Perl have in common."
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PAGI - Perl Asynchronous Gateway Interface (AKA PSGI/Plack 2.0)
The PAGI project aims to bring modern asynchronous web application capabilities to the Perl ecosystem
by implementing an ASGI-inspired interface that allows Perl applications to handle HTTP and lifespan events
using async/await semantics. Modelled after Python’s ASGI, PAGI establishes a language-agnostic gateway layer
between web servers and application logic, enabling high-performance request handling,
graceful startup/shutdown workflows,
and future scalability toward real-time and streaming protocols.
Unlike traditional Perl web frameworks—which operate in a synchronous,
PSGI-style request/response lifecycle—PAGI introduces structured concurrency for IO,
allowing workloads to be offloaded efficiently or parallelized using async pipelines,
worker pools, or hybrid designs, without abandoning Perl’s synchronous DBI compatibility
or legacy integration requirements. The project addresses challenges inherent in modern web workloads,
such as WebSocket handling, service startup signalling, long-lived connections, and system orchestrations,
while remaining backwards compatible with existing Perl infrastructure.
By providing a clean abstraction around application lifecycle, event loops, and shared state propagation,
PAGI positions Perl for modern compute environments including containerized deployments, edge systems,
and MCP-driven AI service orchestration.
The result is a forward-looking architecture that retains Perl’s strengths in reliability
and performance on synchronous workloads while opening the door to next-generation async services,
including low-latency chat systems, high-throughput API gateways, and AI middleware integrations.
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Use of Perl in Chemical Analysis of Food & Agricultural Products
Details to be forthcoming...
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Proposals in discussion with Brett Estrade, Will Braswell, Paul Cochrane, and more...
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