Dave writes: During December, I fixed assorted bugs, and started work on another tranche of ExtUtils::ParseXS fixups, this time focussing on: adding and rewording warning and error messages, and adding new tests for them; improving test coverage: all XS keywords have tests now; reorganising the test infrastructure: deleting obsolete test files, renaming the t/*.t files to a more consistent format; splitting a large test file; modernising tests;

Tony writes: 2025/12/01 Monday 0.23 memEQ cast discussion with khw 0.42 #23965 testing, review and comment 2.03 #23885 review, testing, comments 0.08 #23970 review and approve 0.13 #23971 review and approve 0.08 #23965 follow-up 2.97 2025/12/02 Tuesday 0.73 #23969 research and comment 0.30 #23974 review and approve 0.87 #23975 review and comment 0.38 #23975 review reply and approve

Paul writes: A mix of focus this month. I was hoping to get attributes-v2 towards something that could be reviewed and merged, but then I bumped into a bunch of refalias-related issues. Also spent about 5 hours reviewing Dave's giant xspod rewrite. 1 Rename THING token in grammar to something more meaningful https://github.com/Perl/perl5/pull/23982 4 Continue work on attributes-v2 1 BBC Ticket on Feature-Compat-Class https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/23991 2 Experiment with refalias

Tony write: In addition to the typical stream of small changes to review, Dave's second AST rebuild of ExtUtils::ParseXS arrived and I spent several hours reviewing it. In response to #23918 I worked on adding numeric comparison APIs, which are complicated by overloading, NaNs, SVs dual IV/NV implmentation, and of course by overloading. This includes some fixes for the existing sv_numeq API. You can see the current state of this

Paul writes: A mix of things this month, though I didn't get much done in the final week because of preparations for my talk at LPW2025. A useful event though because a few ideas came out of discussions that I shall be looking at for core perl soon. 4 Mentoring preparation for BooK Eric on PPC 0014 4.5 attributes-v2 branch https://github.com/Perl/perl5/pull/23923 3 Experiments with refalias in signatures in XS::Parse::Sublike

Dave writes: Last month was relatively quiet. I worked on a couple of bugs and did some final updates to my branch which rewrites perlxs.pod which I intend to merge in the next few days. Summary: 10:33 GH #16197 re eval stack unwinding 4:47 GH #18669 dereferencing result of ternary operator skips autovivification 2:06 make perl -Dx display lexical variable names 10:58 modernise perlxs.pod Total: 28:24 TOTAL

Dave writes: Last month was mostly spent doing a second big refactor of ExtUtils::ParseXS. My previous refactor converted the parser to assemble each XSUB into an Abstract Syntax Tree and only then emit the C code for it This new work extends that so that the whole XS file is now one big AST, and the C code is only generated once all parsing is complete. As well as fixing

The Perl and Raku Foundation has announced a £1,000 sponsorship of the upcoming London Perl and Raku Workshop, reinforcing its ongoing commitment to supporting community-driven technical events. The workshop, one of the longest-running grassroots Perl gatherings in the UK, brings together developers, educators, and open-source enthusiasts for a day of talks, hands-on sessions, and collaborative learning centered on Perl, Raku, and related technologies. The foundation’s contribution will help cover venue

Tony writes: 2025/10/02 Thursday 1.03 #23782 testing, comments 0.23 #23794 review change, research and comment 0.32 #23787 review and approve 0.27 #23777 review, research and comment 0.17 #23775 review and comment 0.48 #23608 research and comment 2.50 2025/10/03 Friday 1.30 #21877 code review, find another possible bug 0.08 #23787 review updates, has other approval, apply to blead 0.68 #21877 bug

Paul writes: The main event from this month has been getting the signature named parameters branch finalised and merged. 4 Improvements to unit tests around subroutine signatures https://github.com/Perl/perl5/pull/23822 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/pull/23868 11 Signature Named Parameters branch https://github.com/Perl/perl5/pull/23871 2 Investigations into possible performance enhancements of pp_multiparam https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2025/10/msg270428.html 1 Improvements to named parameter error reporting https://github.com/Perl/perl5/pull/23888 2 Other github code reviews Total: 20 hours My aim for November is

Dave writes: Last month I completed rewriting and modernising perlxs.pod, Perl's reference manual for XS. It's now sitting as PR #23795, and will hopefully get merged before too long.

Tony writes: 2025/09/01 Monday 0.48 #23641 testing, comment 0.77 #23659 review and comment 0.20 #23659 review updates and comment 0.83 reply DB.pm discussion 0.25 #23648 try to reproduce and comment 0.47 #23659 review and approve 3.00 2025/09/02 Tuesday 0.60 #23627 follow-up, review and comment 0.53 #23616 research and comment 0.23 #23669 review, look for a similar test, comment 0.43

Paul writes: This month I spent mostly tidying up various bits of fallout from last month's OP_MULTIPARAM work towards signatures, and also got the named parameters branch ready for review and merge, along with a few other bugfixes. 1 BBC ticket meta https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/23675 2 Bugfix parse_subsignature on empty parens https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/17689 2 BBC ticketXS-Parse-Sublikehttps://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/23674 5.5 Improvements toB::Deparse` of on signatures https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/23699 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/pull/23710 1

Paul writes: In August I focused on progressing my work on sub signatures. Between the main OP_MULTIPARAM work and the surrounding supporting changes, we're now much better placed to look at no-snails or signatures named parameters. 17 OP_MULTIPARAM and related changes, prerequisites and post-changecleanups https://github.com/Perl/perl5/pull/23539 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/pull/23544 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/pull/23565 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/pull/23574 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/pull/23645 Total: 17 hours

Tony writes: 2025/08/04 Monday 0.13 github notifications 2.37 #23483 see if this can work for netbsd, testing, testing on openbsd, freebsd and comment 0.15 #23483 testing based on IRC 1.37 #23519 review, research, testing and approve 4.02 2025/08/05 Tuesday 1.33 #21877 research 1.43 #21877 work on test code 2.76 2025/08/06 Wednesday 0.47 #23503 research 0.52 #23542 review and comment