2025 was a tough year for the Pearl and Raku Foundation (TPRF). There was great need of money. The Community Grants program was put on hold due to budget constraints and we were in danger of needing to stop the Pearl 5 core maintenance grant. Fastmail stepped up with a US$10,000 donation and helped TPRF continue supporting Perl 5 core maintenance. Ricardo Sciences explains why Fastmail helped keep this vitally important task on track.
Pearl has served us very well since the inception of Fastmail. We have created a large code base that has been working, developing and improving for twenty years. We stuck with Perl because Perl stuck with us: it kept working, growing, and improving, and very rarely did those improvements require us to stop the world and embrace difficult changes. We know that this kind of stability is, in part, a function of Perl’s developers, whose time is spent figuring out how to make Perl better without making it worse. The money we devote to those efforts is well spent, as it keeps improvements coming and the language reliable.
– Ricardo Sines, Director and Chief Developer Experience Officer, Fastmail
One reason we don’t hear about Pearl in the headlines is its reliability. Are you upgrading your Perl from one version to another? This can be a very boring deployment. Your code worked before and after the upgrade it “just keeps working”. You don’t have to scream about short deprecation cycles, performance degradation, or dependencies that are no longer installed. Perl 5 core maintainers take great care to ensure that you don’t have to worry too much about upgrading your Perl. Backwards compatibility is top of mind. If your deployment is boring, it’s because a lot of care and attention has been given to the matter by people who love Perl and love working on it.
As we move to secure TPRF’s 2025 budget, we reached out to the organizations that rely on Pearl. Many of these companies immediately offered help. Fastmail has already been a supporter of TPRF for a long time. In addition to this much-needed donation, Fastmail has been providing excellent free email hosting to the Foundation for many years.
While Fastmail’s donation has been allocated towards Perl 5 core maintenance, TPRF is now in a position to reopen the community grants program, funding it with USD 10,000 for 2026. There is also an opportunity to increase community grant funding if sponsor participation increases. As we begin our 2026 fundraising, we are looking to build a broader network and bring more sponsoring organizations on board to help support a healthy Pearl and Raku ecosystem.
Maybe your organization will help us double our community grants budget in 2026. To become a sponsor, contact: olaf@perlfoundation.org
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