Announcing the Perl Toolchain Summit 2026

Jan 23, 2026 by Philippe Bruhat (BooK)

Announcing the Perl Toolchain Summit 2026!

The organizers have been working behind the scenes since last September, and today I’m happy to announce that the 16th Perl Toolchain Summit will be held in Vienna, Austria, from Thursday April 23rd till Sunday April 26th, 2026.

This post is brought to you by Simplelists, a group email and mailing list service provider, and a recurring sponsor of the Perl Toolchain Summit.

Started in 2008 as the Perl QA Hackathon in Oslo, the Perl Toolchain Summit is an annual event that brings together the key developers working on the Perl toolchain. Each year (except for 2020-2022), the event moves from country to country all over Europe, organised by local teams of volunteers. The surplus money from previous summits helps fund the next one.

Since 2023, the organizing team is formally split between a “global” team and a “local” team (although this setup has been informally used before).

The global team is made up of veteran PTS organizers, who deal with invitations, finding sponsors, paying bills and communications. They are Laurent Boivin (ELBEHO), Philippe Bruhat (BOOK), Thibault Duponchelle (CONTRA), Tina Müller (TINITA) and Breno de Oliveira (GARU), supported by Les Mongueurs de Perl’s bank account.

The local team members for this year have organized several events in Vienna (including the Perl QA Hackathon 2010!) and deal with finding the venue, the hotel, the catering and welcoming our attendees in Vienna in April. They are Alexander Hartmaier (ABRAXXA), Thomas Klausner (DOMM), Maroš Kollár (MAROS), Michael Kröll and Helmut Wollmersdorfer (WOLLMERS).

The developers who maintain CPAN and associated tools and services are all volunteers, scattered across the globe. This event is the one time in the year when they can get together.

The summit provides dedicated time to work on the critical systems and tools, with all the right people in the same room. The attendees hammer out solutions to thorny problems and discuss new ideas to keep the toolchain moving forward. This year, about 40 people have been invited, with 35 participants expected to join us in Vienna.

If you want to find out more about the work being done at the Toolchain Summit, and hear the teams and people involved, you can listen to several episodes of The Underbar podcast, which were recorded during the 2025 edition in Leipzig, Germany:

Given the important nature of the attendees’ work and their volunteer status, we try to pay for most expenses (travel, lodging, food, etc.) through sponsorship. If you’re interested in helping sponsor the summit, please get in touch with the global team at pts2026@perltoolchainsummit.org.

Simplelists has been sponsoring the Perl Toolchain Summit for several years now. We are very grateful for their continued support.

Simplelists is proud to sponsor the 2026 Perl Toolchain Summit, as Perl forms the core of our technology stack. We are grateful that we can rely on the robust and comprehensive Perl ecosystem, from the core of Perl itself to a whole myriad of CPAN modules. We are glad that the PTS continues its unsung work, ensuring that Simplelists can continue to rely on these many tools.

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