DuckDuckGo Donates $25,000 to The Perl and Raku Foundation v2025

Oct 1, 2025 by Olaf Alders

For the second consecutive year, The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF) is overjoyed to announce a donation of USD 25,000 from DuckDuckGo.

DuckDuckGo has demonstrated how Perl and its ecosystem can deliver power and scale to drive the DuckDuckGo core systems, plug-in framework and Instant Answers. The Foundation is grateful that DuckDuckGo recognises the importance of Perl, and for their generous funding support for a second year through their charitable donations programme.

– Stuart J Mackintosh, President of The Perl and Raku Foundation

Last year’s donation of USD 25,000 from DuckDuckGo was instrumental in helping to fund the foundation’s Core Perl Maintenance Fund and this year’s donation will help to fund more of the same crucial work that keeps the Perl language moving forward.

Paul “LeoNerd” Evans is one of the developers who gets regular funding from the Perl Core Maintenance Fund. Here is a short list of just some of the many contributions which Paul has made to core Perl as part of the maintenance fund work:

• The builtin module (5.36), making available many new useful language-level utilities that were previously loaded from modules like Scalar::Util
• The complete feature ‘class’ system (5.38), adding proper object-orientation syntax and abilities
• Lexical method support (5.42), adding my method and the $obj->&method invocation syntax for better object encapsulation
• Stabilising some of the recent experiments - signatures (5.36), try/catch (5.40), foreach on multiple vars (5.40)
• Ability to use the //= and ||= operators in signatures (5.38), performance improvements and named parameters (upcoming in next release)
• The new any and all keywords (5.42)

We look forward to many more innovative contributions from Paul over the coming year.

While TPRF never takes continued support for granted, when it does arrive, it allows the foundation to plan for the future with much greater confidence. Multi-year partnerships with our sponsors allow us to continue to prioritize important work, knowing that we will have the runway that we need to fund the work which helps to sustain the Perl Language and its associated communities.

For more information on how to become a sponsor, please contact: olaf@perlfoundation.org

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