Geizhals Preisvergleich Donates USD 10,000 to The Perl and Raku Foundation

Sep 18, 2025 by Olaf Alders

Today The Perl and Raku Foundation is thrilled to announce a donation of USD 10,000 from Geizhals Preisvergleich. This gift helps to secure the future of The Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund.

Perl has been an integral part of our product price comparison platform from the start of the company 25 years ago. Supporting the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund means supporting both present and future of a substantial pillar of Modern Open Source Computing, for us and other current or prospective users.

– Michael Kröll of Geizhals Preisvergleich

“Geizhals is not only providing core funding for the Perl ecosystem, but also supporting developers, actively contributing to European conferences, and employing Perl coders. Their interest in the strategic maintenance and development of Perl and CPAN is of great value to us all, and their investment is very much appreciated.”

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

But who exactly is Geizhals, and why does their support matter so much to the Perl community?

Geizhals Preisvergleich began in July of 1997 as a hobby project—and yes, “Geizhals” literally translates to “skinflint” in English (they even operate skinflint.co.uk for UK users!). From those humble beginnings, they’ve leveraged the power of Perl to scale up to serving 4.3 million monthly users. With Perl being a key part of their infrastructure, they have generously decided to support the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund.

While many of us know about the Core Maintenance Fund, the specific problems it addresses often remain invisible to users. I reached out to the maintainers whose work is supported by this fund. This is what core maintainer Tony Cook had to say:

My work tends to be little things, I review other people’s work which I think improves quality and velocity, and fix more minor issues, some examples would be:

• a fix to signal handling where perl could crash where an external library created threads (#22487)

• fix a segmentation fault in smartmatch against a sub if the sub exited via a loop exit op (such as last) (#16608)

• fixed a bug where a regexp warning could leak memory.

• prevent a confusing undefined warning message when accessing a sub parameter that was placeholder for a hash element indexed by an undef key (#22423)

What Tony has highlighted are the kinds of bug fixes which collectively help to ensure that Perl remains stable, secure and reliable for the many organisations and individuals who depend on it.

With organizations like Geizhals Preisvergleich funding the work which Tony and others put into maintaining the Perl 5 core, we can work together to ensure that the Perl core continues to receive the maintenance which it deserves, for many years to come. Whether you’re a startup using Perl for rapid prototyping or an enterprise running mission-critical systems, your support helps ensure Perl remains reliable for everyone. Please join us on this journey.

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