In August, Perl mongers gathered in Pisa for the annual YAPC::EU, one of the biggest Perl meetings. I couldn’t make it there, but at least I finally got to check out the presentation recordings.
Unfortunately, the recordings are pretty bad, for the most part. The speakers are hard or impossible to hear, and worse, the slides are unreadable. For technical presentations with code, that’s a dealbreaker. I know one doesn’t complain about volunteer efforts, especially when one cannot make a reasonable suggestion for improvement. So all I want to say is that it would be great if the organizers of next year’s YAPC::EU could improve on that.
But then, it just means I gotta go myself next time. It’s a community event, after all.
Anyway, I still made some notes on what I saw. Here are the interesting bits.
Leon Timmerman presented An alternative to XS. He said that while XS is flexible and mature, it’s yet another new language to learn and it’s not trivial. Instead, Leon is working on using C++ templates to do the same job. Let’s see how that works out.
Dave Rolsky showed off Fey and Fey::ORM. It’s too bad I couldn’t really follow his talk nor see any of the slides, because I’m having a really hard time with the ORMs I’ve seen and I was wondering if I’m just too dumb. In his introduction Dave says that the same happened to him, so he wrote Fey as a different kind of ORM. I might be grossly misrepresenting, from memory, what he actually said. I will keep Fey on the radar.
Aaron Crane’s Perl on Speed: Multicore Programming for Mortals has clear audio, but no slides. Aaron prefers processes over threads. It’s easier, the OS does advanced scheduling for you, and not having shared memory forces you to write a clear architecture with data being passed at clear boundaries. Processes are cheap on Linux anyway. However, I wonder to what extent that preference for processes is due to Perl’s less-than-optimal thread implementation. Erlang processes are super cheap and work great into the thousands, per core.
SawyerX presented When Perl Met Android, which I found really interesting. I didn’t know about SL4A, the Scripting Layer for Android. It runs an RPC server that speaks JSON, so different languages can easily interface with it. I only watched the first half of Sawyer’s talk as the second half consists of code samples that you can’t see in the recording. But it was good to learn that Android.pm supports almost all of the Android API: dialogs, sensors, GPS, text-to-speech, etc. It also supports daemons. Someone got Plack to run---local web apps!
And the price for the funniest announcement goes to Dave Cross for Perl Vogue. “Is Plack the new Black?” Dave announced www.perlvogue.com, where Perl fashionistas check out the latest trends.
Wow, amazing how many presentations you can watch when you stop two minutes in for most of them :-)