Howdy! We have a full three day conference planned in Toronto, running July 11-13 -- that's just 4 1/2 weeks away!

If you haven't registered and grabbed a room yet, this is a reminder that our room block will disappear on Monday, June 19, so be sure to grab the room you want before that date.

In addition to the conference, there's going to be a hackathon on Monday, July 10, and Dave Rolsky will be putting on a one-day Go class on Friday July 14. That's all taking place at the venue, the Doubletree Hilton on Chestnut, in downtown Toronto. Please visit the conference website for more information, and I hope to see LOTS of you there!

"The only languages younger than 10 years in the current top 100 are: Swift (#14), Rust (#17), Crystal (#48), Solidity (#59), Pony (#71), Raku (#72), Zig (#88) and Hack (#92). None of them are less than 5 years old. In other words, it is almost impossible to hit the charts as a newbie. On the contrary, we see that golden oldies revive. Take for instance Fortran, which is back in the top 20 thanks to the growing demand for numerical computational power. So, if you have just invented a brand new language, please have some patience!" -- Paul Jansen CEO TIOBE Software

Crossposted from https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/1344vs5/pdl_2083_released_and_updates_from_a_year_of/

A new release of PDL is out!

A summary of changes over the last year since PDL 2.077:

• PDL::IO::STL: read and write STL (stereolithography format) files that are used in applications such as 3D printing.
• Improvements to the C API and PP code generator (many in order to support writing bindings to external non-PDL code).
• Incorporation of several of Bryan Jurish's PDL::VectorValued functions into the core PDL distribution. Thank you Bryan Jurish!
• Continuing improvements to add complex number support to more PDL functions such as conv2d() and interpolate(). Thank you W. Luis Mochán & Eric Wheeler!
• Improvements to handling of badvals, NaNs, and empty ndarrays for various functions (Ufunc, setops, whereND, append). Thanks to Kieron Taylor & James Cook!
• Improvements to documentation generation for non-core PDL modules.
• New sound demo by Harald Jörg!

And finally thanks to all the folks reporting bugs!

But that's not all! There have been several exciting releases in the broader World of PDL:

• Eric Wheeler has released two modules
  • PDL::IO::Touchstone: read and write Touchstone files which are used to deal with complex-valued RF sample data.
  • PDL::Opt::Simplex::Simple: simple interface to simplex optimization.
• Vikas N. Kumar's and kmx's PDL::Finance::TA has seen many improvements. You can use it through a Prima-based GUI at App::financeta.
• Ingo Schmid and Ed (@mohawk2) have released a PDL interface for OpenCV at PDL::OpenCV. Many of the updates to the code generation in the past year have been motivated by this release!
• (self-plug) AI::TensorFlow::Libtensorflow: bindings to the low-level libtensorflow deep learning library. Several demos are available in the release and usable via Docker.
• David Mertens has graciously given co-maint out for PDL::Drawing::Prima and PDL::Graphics::Prima. With many fixes to bring the code up to date with the latest Prima thanks to Dmitry Karasik, this now works again for use as a plotting engine for PDL::Graphics::Simple. There are also some updates to David's https://github.com/PDLPorters/App-Prima-REPL to bring it up to date.
• Dmitry Karasik has also released updates to PDL::PrimaImage.
• Several updates to PDL::Graphics::Gnuplot including use of Alien::Gnuplot to install a working Gnuplot.

• fix some memory leaking - thanks Yury Pakhomov for report
• fix various problems with empty ndarrays - thanks @falsifian for report/tests
• no more HTML doc generation
• PDL::Doc::add_module now adds all submodules of given namespace (#420)
• OtherPars can now be incomplete arrays of pdl* (#421)
• add sound demo - thanks @HaraldJoerg
• inplace operations no longer copy input arg if inplace

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 Strawberry Perl project has put out a developer pre-release of Strawberry Perl. There are some modules missing still (DBD::Oracle, PDL, Crypt::OpenSSL::DSA for example), but if you use Strawberry Perl, please test it and provide feedback via Github.

If you can help with the open tickets, your help getting the modules included in Strawbery Perl is certainly appreciated.

• fix build issue with "invalid register for .seh_savexmm"
• add ppport.h
• add core_bools and encode_core_bools methods to support builtin::true and false on perl >= 5.36

  core_bools also works towards compatibility with JSON::PP, and with both of these options it is possible to have correct, full round-trip encode/decode between Perl and JSON booleans.

• fix floating point precision issues with -Duselongdouble and -Dusequadmath
• fix intermittent garbage in floating point numbers from encode with -Dusequadmath (fix taken from Cpanel::JSON::XS ad072b4)
• drop common::sense as a direct dependency (it's still used indirectly via Types::Serialiser, though)
• fix repository and issue tracker for CPAN (thanks to Gabor Szabo)

Those who previously reported build failures, could you please retest?

I'd also be interested in benchmarks on various configurations. The distribution now includes a bench_simdjson.pl in the eg directory, just run it with as many JSON files as you'd like. If you report benchmark results, please include the CPU type and the output of JSON::SIMD::simdjson_version as well.

With this version, I think I've added everything I've wanted. In the future I'll intend to track new releases from both JSON::XS and simdjson, and of course I'd fix any reported bugs ASAP. (There is one major new feature I'm thinking about, the ability to have partial/deferred decodes and precomputed encodes similar to Go's json.RawMessage, but I don't have a clean and safe design for it yet, so it'll have to wait. I don't want to add ad-hoc features haphazardly.)

I hereby announce the release of a new JSON encoder/decoder module called JSON::SIMD.

It is a fork of JSON::XS where the decoder was replaced with simdjson, a recent high-performance C++ JSON parser that uses SIMD instructions found in newer CPUs to make decoding as fast as possible.

The module is intended to be a drop-in replacement for JSON::XS, indeed the encoder part is unmodified, and the legacy decoder is kept to support the functionality that could not be implemented with the simdjson decoder. But for the most common scenarios the simdjson decoder is the default, offering a speedup ranging from a few percents to 100+%, depending on the size and structure of the JSON document and the available instruction set. See the documentation for benchmarks.

The interface is mostly the same as that of JSON::XS, with one notable addition: there is a new method decode_at_pointer, which leverages simdjson's ability to quickly scan through the document to return just a part of the document, without needing to decode and allocate for the rest.

Example:

my $large_json = '{
   "ignore": "this",
   "don't need": ["these", "either"],
   "foo": ["bar", {"baz": "quux"}]
}';
JSON::SIMD->new->use_simdjson->decode_at_pointer($large_json, '/foo/1'
+);
=> {bar => 'quux'}
[download]

I'd be interested in seeing benchmarks - if you create one, please include the output of simdjson_version as well.

FAQ (Facetiously Anticipated Questions):

Why a new module?

When I came across simdjson, I've looked at the section in their documentation that listed the available ports and bindings, and noticed that one particular language was conspicuously missing. I wanted to remedy that situation.

Why JSON::XS?

I didn't want to start with a clean slate, because I saw value in having the encoder and decoder in the same all-in-one package, and I didn't want to rewrite the encoder part from scratch, so it was logical to start from an established module. JSON::XS was chosen as the basis for the fork because I has been using that module at $work and elsewhere without problems, so preserving compatibility with it was seen as an important goal.

• It supports modules highgui, imgcodecs, imgproc, objdetect, tracking, videoio
• In particular, it supports just about every class and function within those modules that are supported by the Python binding
• Where possible, all inputs and outputs are ndarrays which get wrapped into Mat, Rect, std::vector<int>, etc internally, then translated back
• There is a simplistic translation of the Doxygen docs into POD, see on MetaCPAN: https://metacpan.org/dist/PDL-OpenCV
• It includes a perldl demo which shows off basic image-processing stuff (demo opencv)

• Support the Params classes (possibly from Perl-land as a hash-ref)
• Support more of the modules, both in the main OpenCV distribution and the "contrib" ones

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.

• allow OtherPars of e.g. nsize => n to set index-size of not-otherwise-used index
• fix [o] OtherPars to work if PMCode provided
• fix nested loop() bug for Pars with e.g. (n,n)
• add pp_add_typemaps
• bug fixes: MatrixOps::det now always returns an ndarray
• fixed the intersect bug in 11150528

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 full article.

I'm pretty excited to share the news that The Perl and Raku Conference will be in Toronto this year, July 11-13, 2023. You can find the TPF posting here and you can go to the cool tprc-to website here.

The Call For Papers is now open, and the deadline is the end of March .. so if you have something you'd like to present, get that in soon! I'm looking forward to seeing lots of folks at this event.

In this post Mark Keating announces the closing down of the Enlightened Perl Organisation.

Among other things of them I see strawberryperl

L*

perl.social is here!

perl.social announcement on reddit

perl.social Standards of Conduct

L*

As per this tweet from MetaCPAN the Twitter API changes coming very soon will mean an end to using Twitter to login to MetaCPAN. If this is your only login method, now might be a good time to pick another one.

I miss BitCard.

Update: the full-fat twitter link is here, in case the nitter version fails.