perl5140delta - what is new for perl v5.14.0



NAME

perl5140delta - what is new for perl v5.14.0


DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.12.0 release and the 5.14.0 release.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.10.0, first read the perl5120delta manpage, which describes differences between 5.10.0 and 5.12.0.

Some of the bug fixes in this release have been backported to subsequent releases of 5.12.x. Those are indicated with the 5.12.x version in parentheses.


Notice

As described in the perlpolicy manpage, the release of Perl 5.14.0 marks the official end of support for Perl 5.10. Users of Perl 5.10 or earlier should consider upgrading to a more recent release of Perl.


Core Enhancements

Unicode

Unicode Version 6.0 is now supported (mostly)

Perl comes with the Unicode 6.0 data base updated with Corrigendum #8, with one exception noted below. See http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.0.0/ for details on the new release. Perl does not support any Unicode provisional properties, including the new ones for this release.

Unicode 6.0 has chosen to use the name BELL for the character at U+1F514, which is a symbol that looks like a bell, and is used in Japanese cell phones. This conflicts with the long-standing Perl usage of having BELL mean the ASCII BEL character, U+0007. In Perl 5.14, \N{BELL} continues to mean U+0007, but its use generates a deprecation warning message unless such warnings are turned off. The new name for U+0007 in Perl is ALERT, which corresponds nicely with the existing shorthand sequence for it, "\a". \N{BEL} means U+0007, with no warning given. The character at U+1F514 has no name in 5.14, but can be referred to by \N{U+1F514}. In Perl 5.16, \N{BELL} will refer to U+1F514; all code that uses \N{BELL} should be converted to use \N{ALERT}, \N{BEL}, or "\a" before upgrading.

Full functionality for use feature 'unicode_strings'

This release provides full functionality for use feature 'unicode_strings'. Under its scope, all string operations executed and regular expressions compiled (even if executed outside its scope) have Unicode semantics. See the 'unicode_strings' feature in the feature manpage. However, see Inverted bracketed character classes and multi-character folds, below.

This feature avoids most forms of the ``Unicode Bug'' (see The ``Unicode Bug'' in the perlunicode manpage for details). If there is any possibility that your code will process Unicode strings, you are strongly encouraged to use this subpragma to avoid nasty surprises.

\N{NAME} and charnames enhancements

See the charnames manpage for details on all these changes.

New warnings categories for problematic (non-)Unicode code points.

Three new warnings subcategories of ``utf8'' have been added. These allow you to turn off some ``utf8'' warnings, while allowing other warnings to remain on. The three categories are: surrogate when UTF-16 surrogates are encountered; nonchar when Unicode non-character code points are encountered; and non_unicode when code points above the legal Unicode maximum of 0x10FFFF are encountered.

Any unsigned value can be encoded as a character

With this release, Perl is adopting a model that any unsigned value can be treated as a code point and encoded internally (as utf8) without warnings, not just the code points that are legal in Unicode. However, unless utf8 or the corresponding sub-category (see previous item) of lexical warnings have been explicitly turned off, outputting or executing a Unicode-defined operation such as upper-casing on such a code point generates a warning. Attempting to input these using strict rules (such as with the :encoding(UTF-8) layer) will continue to fail. Prior to this release, handling was inconsistent and in places, incorrect.

Unicode non-characters, some of which previously were erroneously considered illegal in places by Perl, contrary to the Unicode Standard, are now always legal internally. Inputting or outputting them works the same as with the non-legal Unicode code points, because the Unicode Standard says they are (only) illegal for ``open interchange''.

Unicode database files not installed

The Unicode database files are no longer installed with Perl. This doesn't affect any functionality in Perl and saves significant disk space. If you need these files, you can download them from http://www.unicode.org/Public/zipped/6.0.0/.

Regular Expressions

(?^...) construct signifies default modifiers

An ASCII caret "^" immediately following a "(?" in a regular expression now means that the subexpression does not inherit surrounding modifiers such as /i, but reverts to the Perl defaults. Any modifiers following the caret override the defaults.

Stringification of regular expressions now uses this notation. For example, qr/hlagh/i would previously be stringified as (?i-xsm:hlagh), but now it's stringified as (?^i:hlagh).

The main purpose of this change is to allow tests that rely on the stringification not to have to change whenever new modifiers are added. See Extended Patterns in the perlre manpage.

This change is likely to break code that compares stringified regular expressions with fixed strings containing ?-xism.

/d, /l, /u, and /a modifiers

Four new regular expression modifiers have been added. These are mutually exclusive: one only can be turned on at a time.

See Modifiers in the perlre manpage for more detail.

Non-destructive substitution

The substitution (s///) and transliteration (y///) operators now support an /r option that copies the input variable, carries out the substitution on the copy, and returns the result. The original remains unmodified.

  my $old = "cat";
  my $new = $old =~ s/cat/dog/r;
  # $old is "cat" and $new is "dog"

This is particularly useful with map. See the perlop manpage for more examples.

Re-entrant regular expression engine

It is now safe to use regular expressions within (?{...}) and (??{...}) code blocks inside regular expressions.

These blocks are still experimental, however, and still have problems with lexical (my) variables and abnormal exiting.

use re '/flags'

The re pragma now has the ability to turn on regular expression flags till the end of the lexical scope:

    use re "/x";
    "foo" =~ / (.+) /;  # /x implied

See '/flags' mode in the re manpage for details.

\o{...} for octals

There is a new octal escape sequence, "\o", in doublequote-like contexts. This construct allows large octal ordinals beyond the current max of 0777 to be represented. It also allows you to specify a character in octal which can safely be concatenated with other regex snippets and which won't be confused with being a backreference to a regex capture group. See Capture groups in the perlre manpage.

Add \p{Titlecase} as a synonym for \p{Title}

This synonym is added for symmetry with the Unicode property names \p{Uppercase} and \p{Lowercase}.

Regular expression debugging output improvement

Regular expression debugging output (turned on by use re 'debug') now uses hexadecimal when escaping non-ASCII characters, instead of octal.

Return value of delete $+{...}

Custom regular expression engines can now determine the return value of delete on an entry of %+ or %-.

Syntactical Enhancements

Array and hash container functions accept references

Warning: This feature is considered experimental, as the exact behaviour may change in a future version of Perl.

All builtin functions that operate directly on array or hash containers now also accept unblessed hard references to arrays or hashes:

  |----------------------------+---------------------------|
  | Traditional syntax         | Terse syntax              |
  |----------------------------+---------------------------|
  | push @$arrayref, @stuff    | push $arrayref, @stuff    |
  | unshift @$arrayref, @stuff | unshift $arrayref, @stuff |
  | pop @$arrayref             | pop $arrayref             |
  | shift @$arrayref           | shift $arrayref           |
  | splice @$arrayref, 0, 2    | splice $arrayref, 0, 2    |
  | keys %$hashref             | keys $hashref             |
  | keys @$arrayref            | keys $arrayref            |
  | values %$hashref           | values $hashref           |
  | values @$arrayref          | values $arrayref          |
  | ($k,$v) = each %$hashref   | ($k,$v) = each $hashref   |
  | ($k,$v) = each @$arrayref  | ($k,$v) = each $arrayref  |
  |----------------------------+---------------------------|

This allows these builtin functions to act on long dereferencing chains or on the return value of subroutines without needing to wrap them in @{} or %{}:

  push @{$obj->tags}, $new_tag;  # old way
  push $obj->tags,    $new_tag;  # new way
  for ( keys %{$hoh->{genres}{artists}} ) {...} # old way 
  for ( keys $hoh->{genres}{artists}    ) {...} # new way

Single term prototype

The + prototype is a special alternative to $ that acts like \[@%] when given a literal array or hash variable, but will otherwise force scalar context on the argument. See Prototypes in the perlsub manpage.

package block syntax

A package declaration can now contain a code block, in which case the declaration is in scope inside that block only. So package Foo { ... } is precisely equivalent to { package Foo; ... }. It also works with a version number in the declaration, as in package Foo 1.2 { ... }, which is its most attractive feature. See the perlfunc manpage.

Statement labels can appear in more places

Statement labels can now occur before any type of statement or declaration, such as package.

Stacked labels

Multiple statement labels can now appear before a single statement.

Uppercase X/B allowed in hexadecimal/binary literals

Literals may now use either upper case 0X... or 0B... prefixes, in addition to the already supported 0x... and 0b... syntax [perl #76296].

C, Ruby, Python, and PHP already support this syntax, and it makes Perl more internally consistent: a round-trip with eval sprintf "%#X", 0x10 now returns 16, just like eval sprintf "%#x", 0x10.

Overridable tie functions

tie, tied and untie can now be overridden [perl #75902].

Exception Handling

To make them more reliable and consistent, several changes have been made to how die, warn, and $@ behave.

Other Enhancements

Assignment to $0 sets the legacy process name with prctl() on Linux

On Linux the legacy process name is now set with prctl(2), in addition to altering the POSIX name via argv[0], as Perl has done since version 4.000. Now system utilities that read the legacy process name such as ps, top, and killall recognize the name you set when assigning to $0. The string you supply is truncated at 16 bytes; this limitation is imposed by Linux.

srand() now returns the seed

This allows programs that need to have repeatable results not to have to come up with their own seed-generating mechanism. Instead, they can use srand() and stash the return value for future use. One example is a test program with too many combinations to test comprehensively in the time available for each run. It can test a random subset each time and, should there be a failure, log the seed used for that run so this can later be used to produce the same results.

printf-like functions understand post-1980 size modifiers

Perl's printf and sprintf operators, and Perl's internal printf replacement function, now understand the C90 size modifiers ``hh'' (char), ``z'' (size_t), and ``t'' (ptrdiff_t). Also, when compiled with a C99 compiler, Perl now understands the size modifier ``j'' (intmax_t) (but this is not portable).

So, for example, on any modern machine, sprintf("%hhd", 257) returns ``1''.

New global variable ${^GLOBAL_PHASE}

A new global variable, ${^GLOBAL_PHASE}, has been added to allow introspection of the current phase of the Perl interpreter. It's explained in detail in ${^GLOBAL_PHASE} in the perlvar manpage and in BEGIN, UNITCHECK, CHECK, INIT and END in the perlmod manpage.

-d:-foo calls Devel::foo::unimport

The syntax -d:foo was extended in 5.6.1 to make -d:foo=bar equivalent to -MDevel::foo=bar, which expands internally to use Devel::foo 'bar'. Perl now allows prefixing the module name with -, with the same semantics as -M; that is:

-d:-foo
Equivalent to -M-Devel::foo: expands to no Devel::foo and calls Devel::foo->unimport() if that method exists.

-d:-foo=bar
Equivalent to -M-Devel::foo=bar: expands to no Devel::foo 'bar', and calls Devel::foo->unimport("bar") if that method exists.

This is particularly useful for suppressing the default actions of a Devel::* module's import method whilst still loading it for debugging.

Filehandle method calls load the IO::File manpage on demand

When a method call on a filehandle would die because the method cannot be resolved and the IO::File manpage has not been loaded, Perl now loads the IO::File manpage via require and attempts method resolution again:

  open my $fh, ">", $file;
  $fh->binmode(":raw");     # loads IO::File and succeeds

This also works for globs like STDOUT, STDERR, and STDIN:

  STDOUT->autoflush(1);

Because this on-demand load happens only if method resolution fails, the legacy approach of manually loading an the IO::File manpage parent class for partial method support still works as expected:

  use IO::Handle;
  open my $fh, ">", $file;
  $fh->autoflush(1);        # IO::File not loaded

Improved IPv6 support

The Socket module provides new affordances for IPv6, including implementations of the Socket::getaddrinfo() and Socket::getnameinfo() functions, along with related constants and a handful of new functions. See the Socket manpage.

DTrace probes now include package name

The DTrace probes now include an additional argument, arg3, which contains the package the subroutine being entered or left was compiled in.

For example, using the following DTrace script:

  perl$target:::sub-entry
  {
      printf("%s::%s\n", copyinstr(arg0), copyinstr(arg3));
  }

and then running:

  $ perl -e 'sub test { }; test'

DTrace will print:

  main::test

New C APIs

See Internal Changes.


Security

User-defined regular expression properties

User-Defined Character Properties in the perlunicode manpage documented that you can create custom properties by defining subroutines whose names begin with ``In'' or ``Is''. However, Perl did not actually enforce that naming restriction, so \p{foo::bar} could call foo::bar() if it existed. The documented convention is now enforced.

Also, Perl no longer allows tainted regular expressions to invoke a user-defined property. It simply dies instead [perl #82616].


Incompatible Changes

Perl 5.14.0 is not binary-compatible with any previous stable release.

In addition to the sections that follow, see C API Changes.

Regular Expressions and String Escapes

Inverted bracketed character classes and multi-character folds

Some characters match a sequence of two or three characters in /i regular expression matching under Unicode rules. One example is LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S which matches the sequence ss.

 'ss' =~ /\A[\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S}]\z/i  # Matches

This, however, can lead to very counter-intuitive results, especially when inverted. Because of this, Perl 5.14 does not use multi-character /i matching in inverted character classes.

 'ss' =~ /\A[^\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S}]+\z/i  # ???

This should match any sequences of characters that aren't the SHARP S nor what SHARP S matches under /i. "s" isn't SHARP S, but Unicode says that "ss" is what SHARP S matches under /i. So which one ``wins''? Do you fail the match because the string has ss or accept it because it has an s followed by another s?

Earlier releases of Perl did allow this multi-character matching, but due to bugs, it mostly did not work.

\400-\777

In certain circumstances, \400-\777 in regexes have behaved differently than they behave in all other doublequote-like contexts. Since 5.10.1, Perl has issued a deprecation warning when this happens. Now, these literals behave the same in all doublequote-like contexts, namely to be equivalent to \x{100}-\x{1FF}, with no deprecation warning.

Use of \400-\777 in the command-line option -0 retain their conventional meaning. They slurp whole input files; previously, this was documented only for -0777.

Because of various ambiguities, you should use the new \o{...} construct to represent characters in octal instead.

Most \p{} properties are now immune to case-insensitive matching

For most Unicode properties, it doesn't make sense to have them match differently under /i case-insensitive matching. Doing so can lead to unexpected results and potential security holes. For example

 m/\p{ASCII_Hex_Digit}+/i

could previously match non-ASCII characters because of the Unicode matching rules (although there were several bugs with this). Now matching under /i gives the same results as non-/i matching except for those few properties where people have come to expect differences, namely the ones where casing is an integral part of their meaning, such as m/\p{Uppercase}/i and m/\p{Lowercase}/i, both of which match the same code points as matched by m/\p{Cased}/i. Details are in Unicode Properties in the perlrecharclass manpage.

User-defined property handlers that need to match differently under /i must be changed to read the new boolean parameter passed to them, which is non-zero if case-insensitive matching is in effect and 0 otherwise. See User-Defined Character Properties in the perlunicode manpage.

\p{} implies Unicode semantics

Specifying a Unicode property in the pattern indicates that the pattern is meant for matching according to Unicode rules, the way \N{NAME} does.

Regular expressions retain their localeness when interpolated

Regular expressions compiled under use locale now retain this when interpolated into a new regular expression compiled outside a use locale, and vice-versa.

Previously, one regular expression interpolated into another inherited the localeness of the surrounding regex, losing whatever state it originally had. This is considered a bug fix, but may trip up code that has come to rely on the incorrect behaviour.

Stringification of regexes has changed

Default regular expression modifiers are now notated using (?^...). Code relying on the old stringification will fail. This is so that when new modifiers are added, such code won't have to keep changing each time this happens, because the stringification will automatically incorporate the new modifiers.

Code that needs to work properly with both old- and new-style regexes can avoid the whole issue by using (for perls since 5.9.5; see the re manpage):

 use re qw(regexp_pattern);
 my ($pat, $mods) = regexp_pattern($re_ref);

If the actual stringification is important or older Perls need to be supported, you can use something like the following:

    # Accept both old and new-style stringification
    my $modifiers = (qr/foobar/ =~ /\Q(?^/) ? "^" : "-xism";

And then use $modifiers instead of -xism.

Run-time code blocks in regular expressions inherit pragmata

Code blocks in regular expressions ((?{...}) and (??{...})) previously did not inherit pragmata (strict, warnings, etc.) if the regular expression was compiled at run time as happens in cases like these two:

  use re "eval";
  $foo =~ $bar; # when $bar contains (?{...})
  $foo =~ /$bar(?{ $finished = 1 })/;

This bug has now been fixed, but code that relied on the buggy behaviour may need to be fixed to account for the correct behaviour.

Stashes and Package Variables

Localised tied hashes and arrays are no longed tied

In the following:

    tie @a, ...;
    {
            local @a;
            # here, @a is a now a new, untied array
    }
    # here, @a refers again to the old, tied array

Earlier versions of Perl incorrectly tied the new local array. This has now been fixed. This fix could however potentially cause a change in behaviour of some code.

Stashes are now always defined

defined %Foo:: now always returns true, even when no symbols have yet been defined in that package.

This is a side-effect of removing a special-case kludge in the tokeniser, added for 5.10.0, to hide side-effects of changes to the internal storage of hashes. The fix drastically reduces hashes' memory overhead.

Calling defined on a stash has been deprecated since 5.6.0, warned on lexicals since 5.6.0, and warned for stashes and other package variables since 5.12.0. defined %hash has always exposed an implementation detail: emptying a hash by deleting all entries from it does not make defined %hash false. Hence defined %hash is not valid code to determine whether an arbitrary hash is empty. Instead, use the behaviour of an empty %hash always returning false in scalar context.

Clearing stashes

Stash list assignment %foo:: = () used to make the stash temporarily anonymous while it was being emptied. Consequently, any of its subroutines referenced elsewhere would become anonymous, showing up as ``(unknown)'' in caller. They now retain their package names such that caller returns the original sub name if there is still a reference to its typeglob and ``foo::__ANON__'' otherwise [perl #79208].

Dereferencing typeglobs

If you assign a typeglob to a scalar variable:

    $glob = *foo;

the glob that is copied to $glob is marked with a special flag indicating that the glob is just a copy. This allows subsequent assignments to $glob to overwrite the glob. The original glob, however, is immutable.

Some Perl operators did not distinguish between these two types of globs. This would result in strange behaviour in edge cases: untie $scalar would not untie the scalar if the last thing assigned to it was a glob (because it treated it as untie *$scalar, which unties a handle). Assignment to a glob slot (such as *$glob = \@some_array) would simply assign \@some_array to $glob.

To fix this, the *{} operator (including its *foo and *$foo forms) has been modified to make a new immutable glob if its operand is a glob copy. This allows operators that make a distinction between globs and scalars to be modified to treat only immutable globs as globs. (tie, tied and untie have been left as they are for compatibility's sake, but will warn. See Deprecations.)

This causes an incompatible change in code that assigns a glob to the return value of *{} when that operator was passed a glob copy. Take the following code, for instance:

    $glob = *foo;
    *$glob = *bar;

The *$glob on the second line returns a new immutable glob. That new glob is made an alias to *bar. Then it is discarded. So the second assignment has no effect.

See http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html for more detail.

Magic variables outside the main package

In previous versions of Perl, magic variables like $!, %SIG, etc. would ``leak'' into other packages. So %foo::SIG could be used to access signals, ${"foo::!"} (with strict mode off) to access C's errno, etc.

This was a bug, or an ``unintentional'' feature, which caused various ill effects, such as signal handlers being wiped when modules were loaded, etc.

This has been fixed (or the feature has been removed, depending on how you see it).

local($_) strips all magic from $_

local() on scalar variables gives them a new value but keeps all their magic intact. This has proven problematic for the default scalar variable $_, where the perlsub manpage recommends that any subroutine that assigns to $_ should first localize it. This would throw an exception if $_ is aliased to a read-only variable, and could in general have various unintentional side-effects.

Therefore, as an exception to the general rule, local($_) will not only assign a new value to $_, but also remove all existing magic from it as well.

Parsing of package and variable names

Parsing the names of packages and package variables has changed: multiple adjacent pairs of colons, as in foo::::bar, are now all treated as package separators.

Regardless of this change, the exact parsing of package separators has never been guaranteed and is subject to change in future Perl versions.

Changes to Syntax or to Perl Operators

given return values

given blocks now return the last evaluated expression, or an empty list if the block was exited by break. Thus you can now write:

    my $type = do {
     given ($num) {
      break     when undef;
      "integer" when /^[+-]?[0-9]+$/;
      "float"   when /^[+-]?[0-9]+(?:\.[0-9]+)?$/;
      "unknown";
     }
    };

See Return value in the perlsyn manpage for details.

Change in parsing of certain prototypes

Functions declared with the following prototypes now behave correctly as unary functions:

  *
  \$ \% \@ \* \&
  \[...]
  ;$ ;*
  ;\$ ;\% etc.
  ;\[...]

Due to this bug fix [perl #75904], functions using the (*), (;$) and (;*) prototypes are parsed with higher precedence than before. So in the following example:

  sub foo(;$);
  foo $a < $b;

the second line is now parsed correctly as foo($a) < $b, rather than foo($a < $b). This happens when one of these operators is used in an unparenthesised argument:

  < > <= >= lt gt le ge
  == != <=> eq ne cmp ~~
  &
  | ^
  &&
  || //
  .. ...
  ?:
  = += -= *= etc.
  , =>

Smart-matching against array slices

Previously, the following code resulted in a successful match:

    my @a = qw(a y0 z);
    my @b = qw(a x0 z);
    @a[0 .. $#b] ~~ @b;

This odd behaviour has now been fixed [perl #77468].

Negation treats strings differently from before

The unary negation operator, -, now treats strings that look like numbers as numbers [perl #57706].

Negative zero

Negative zero (-0.0), when converted to a string, now becomes ``0'' on all platforms. It used to become ``-0'' on some, but ``0'' on others.

If you still need to determine whether a zero is negative, use sprintf("%g", $zero) =~ /^-/ or the the Data::Float manpage module on CPAN.

:= is now a syntax error

Previously my $pi := 4 was exactly equivalent to my $pi : = 4, with the : being treated as the start of an attribute list, ending before the =. The use of := to mean : = was deprecated in 5.12.0, and is now a syntax error. This allows future use of := as a new token.

Outside the core's tests for it, we find no Perl 5 code on CPAN using this construction, so we believe that this change will have little impact on real-world codebases.

If it is absolutely necessary to have empty attribute lists (for example, because of a code generator), simply avoid the error by adding a space before the =.

Change in the parsing of identifiers

Characters outside the Unicode ``XIDStart'' set are no longer allowed at the beginning of an identifier. This means that certain accents and marks that normally follow an alphabetic character may no longer be the first character of an identifier.

Threads and Processes

Directory handles not copied to threads

On systems other than Windows that do not have a fchdir function, newly-created threads no longer inherit directory handles from their parent threads. Such programs would usually have crashed anyway [perl #75154].

close on shared pipes

To avoid deadlocks, the close function no longer waits for the child process to exit if the underlying file descriptor is still in use by another thread. It returns true in such cases.

fork() emulation will not wait for signalled children

On Windows parent processes would not terminate until all forked children had terminated first. However, kill("KILL", ...) is inherently unstable on pseudo-processes, and kill("TERM", ...) might not get delivered if the child is blocked in a system call.

To avoid the deadlock and still provide a safe mechanism to terminate the hosting process, Perl now no longer waits for children that have been sent a SIGTERM signal. It is up to the parent process to waitpid() for these children if child-cleanup processing must be allowed to finish. However, it is also then the responsibility of the parent to avoid the deadlock by making sure the child process can't be blocked on I/O.

See the perlfork manpage for more information about the fork() emulation on Windows.

Configuration

Naming fixes in Policy_sh.SH may invalidate Policy.sh

Several long-standing typos and naming confusions in Policy_sh.SH have been fixed, standardizing on the variable names used in config.sh.

This will change the behaviour of Policy.sh if you happen to have been accidentally relying on its incorrect behaviour.

Perl source code is read in text mode on Windows

Perl scripts used to be read in binary mode on Windows for the benefit of the ByteLoader module (which is no longer part of core Perl). This had the side-effect of breaking various operations on the DATA filehandle, including seek()/tell(), and even simply reading from DATA after filehandles have been flushed by a call to system(), backticks, fork() etc.

The default build options for Windows have been changed to read Perl source code on Windows in text mode now. ByteLoader will (hopefully) be updated on CPAN to automatically handle this situation [perl #28106].


Deprecations

See also Deprecated C APIs.

Omitting a space between a regular expression and subsequent word

Omitting the space between a regular expression operator or its modifiers and the following word is deprecated. For example, m/foo/sand $bar is for now still parsed as m/foo/s and $bar, but will now issue a warning.

\cX

The backslash-c construct was designed as a way of specifying non-printable characters, but there were no restrictions (on ASCII platforms) on what the character following the c could be. Now, a deprecation warning is raised if that character isn't an ASCII character. Also, a deprecation warning is raised for "\c{" (which is the same as simply saying ";").

"\b{" and "\B{"

In regular expressions, a literal "{" immediately following a "\b" (not in a bracketed character class) or a "\B{" is now deprecated to allow for its future use by Perl itself.

Perl 4-era .pl libraries

Perl bundles a handful of library files that predate Perl 5. This bundling is now deprecated for most of these files, which are now available from CPAN. The affected files now warn when run, if they were installed as part of the core.

This is a mandatory warning, not obeying -X or lexical warning bits. The warning is modelled on that supplied by deprecate.pm for deprecated-in-core .pm libraries. It points to the specific CPAN distribution that contains the .pl libraries. The CPAN versions, of course, do not generate the warning.

List assignment to $[

Assignment to $[ was deprecated and started to give warnings in Perl version 5.12.0. This version of Perl (5.14) now also emits a warning when assigning to $[ in list context. This fixes an oversight in 5.12.0.

Use of qw(...) as parentheses

Historically the parser fooled itself into thinking that qw(...) literals were always enclosed in parentheses, and as a result you could sometimes omit parentheses around them:

    for $x qw(a b c) { ... }

The parser no longer lies to itself in this way. Wrap the list literal in parentheses like this:

    for $x (qw(a b c)) { ... }

This is being deprecated because the parentheses in for $i (1,2,3) { ... } are not part of expression syntax. They are part of the statement syntax, with the for statement wanting literal parentheses. The synthetic parentheses that a qw expression acquired were only intended to be treated as part of expression syntax.

Note that this does not change the behaviour of cases like:

    use POSIX qw(setlocale localeconv);
    our @EXPORT = qw(foo bar baz);

where parentheses were never required around the expression.

\N{BELL}

This is because Unicode is using that name for a different character. See Unicode Version 6.0 is now supported (mostly) for more explanation.

?PATTERN?

?PATTERN? (without the initial m) has been deprecated and now produces a warning. This is to allow future use of ? in new operators. The match-once functionality is still available as m?PATTERN?.

Tie functions on scalars holding typeglobs

Calling a tie function (tie, tied, untie) with a scalar argument acts on a filehandle if the scalar happens to hold a typeglob.

This is a long-standing bug that will be removed in Perl 5.16, as there is currently no way to tie the scalar itself when it holds a typeglob, and no way to untie a scalar that has had a typeglob assigned to it.

Now there is a deprecation warning whenever a tie function is used on a handle without an explicit *.

User-defined case-mapping

This feature is being deprecated due to its many issues, as documented in User-Defined Case Mappings (for serious hackers only) in the perlunicode manpage. This feature will be removed in Perl 5.16. Instead use the CPAN module the Unicode::Casing manpage, which provides improved functionality.

Deprecated modules

The following module will be removed from the core distribution in a future release, and should be installed from CPAN instead. Distributions on CPAN that require this should add it to their prerequisites. The core version of these module now issues a deprecation warning.

If you ship a packaged version of Perl, either alone or as part of a larger system, then you should carefully consider the repercussions of core module deprecations. You may want to consider shipping your default build of Perl with a package for the deprecated module that installs into vendor or site Perl library directories. This will inhibit the deprecation warnings.

Alternatively, you may want to consider patching lib/deprecate.pm to provide deprecation warnings specific to your packaging system or distribution of Perl, consistent with how your packaging system or distribution manages a staged transition from a release where the installation of a single package provides the given functionality, to a later release where the system administrator needs to know to install multiple packages to get that same functionality.

You can silence these deprecation warnings by installing the module in question from CPAN. To install the latest version of it by role rather than by name, just install Task::Deprecations::5_14.

the Devel::DProf manpage
We strongly recommend that you install and use the Devel::NYTProf manpage instead of the Devel::DProf manpage, as the Devel::NYTProf manpage offers significantly improved profiling and reporting.


Performance Enhancements

``Safe signals'' optimisation

Signal dispatch has been moved from the runloop into control ops. This should give a few percent speed increase, and eliminates nearly all the speed penalty caused by the introduction of ``safe signals'' in 5.8.0. Signals should still be dispatched within the same statement as they were previously. If this does not happen, or if you find it possible to create uninterruptible loops, this is a bug, and reports are encouraged of how to recreate such issues.

Optimisation of shift() and pop() calls without arguments

Two fewer OPs are used for shift() and pop() calls with no argument (with implicit @_). This change makes shift() 5% faster than shift @_ on non-threaded perls, and 25% faster on threaded ones.

Optimisation of regexp engine string comparison work

The foldEQ_utf8 API function for case-insensitive comparison of strings (which is used heavily by the regexp engine) was substantially refactored and optimised -- and its documentation much improved as a free bonus.

Regular expression compilation speed-up

Compiling regular expressions has been made faster when upgrading the regex to utf8 is necessary but this isn't known when the compilation begins.

String appending is 100 times faster

When doing a lot of string appending, perls built to use the system's malloc could end up allocating a lot more memory than needed in a inefficient way.

sv_grow, the function used to allocate more memory if necessary when appending to a string, has been taught to round up the memory it requests to a certain geometric progression, making it much faster on certain platforms and configurations. On Win32, it's now about 100 times faster.

Eliminate PL_* accessor functions under ithreads

When MULTIPLICITY was first developed, and interpreter state moved into an interpreter struct, thread- and interpreter-local PL_* variables were defined as macros that called accessor functions (returning the address of the value) outside the Perl core. The intent was to allow members within the interpreter struct to change size without breaking binary compatibility, so that bug fixes could be merged to a maintenance branch that necessitated such a size change. This mechanism was redundant and penalised well-behaved code. It has been removed.

Freeing weak references

When there are many weak references to an object, freeing that object can under some circumstances take O(N*N) time to free, where N is the number of references. The circumstances in which this can happen have been reduced [perl #75254]

Lexical array and hash assignments

An earlier optimisation to speed up my @array = ... and my %hash = ... assignments caused a bug and was disabled in Perl 5.12.0.

Now we have found another way to speed up these assignments [perl #82110].

@_ uses less memory

Previously, @_ was allocated for every subroutine at compile time with enough space for four entries. Now this allocation is done on demand when the subroutine is called [perl #72416].

Size optimisations to SV and HV structures

xhv_fill has been eliminated from struct xpvhv, saving 1 IV per hash and on some systems will cause struct xpvhv to become cache-aligned. To avoid this memory saving causing a slowdown elsewhere, boolean use of HvFILL now calls HvTOTALKEYS instead (which is equivalent), so while the fill data when actually required are now calculated on demand, cases when this needs to be done should be rare.

The order of structure elements in SV bodies has changed. Effectively, the NV slot has swapped location with STASH and MAGIC. As all access to SV members is via macros, this should be completely transparent. This change allows the space saving for PVHVs documented above, and may reduce the memory allocation needed for PVIVs on some architectures.

XPV, XPVIV, and XPVNV now allocate only the parts of the SV body they actually use, saving some space.

Scalars containing regular expressions now allocate only the part of the SV body they actually use, saving some space.

Memory consumption improvements to Exporter

The @EXPORT_FAIL AV is no longer created unless needed, hence neither is the typeglob backing it. This saves about 200 bytes for every package that uses Exporter but doesn't use this functionality.

Memory savings for weak references

For weak references, the common case of just a single weak reference per referent has been optimised to reduce the storage required. In this case it saves the equivalent of one small Perl array per referent.

%+ and %- use less memory

The bulk of the Tie::Hash::NamedCapture module used to be in the Perl core. It has now been moved to an XS module to reduce overhead for programs that do not use %+ or %-.

Multiple small improvements to threads

The internal structures of threading now make fewer API calls and fewer allocations, resulting in noticeably smaller object code. Additionally, many thread context checks have been deferred so they're done only as needed (although this is only possible for non-debugging builds).

Adjacent pairs of nextstate opcodes are now optimized away

Previously, in code such as

    use constant DEBUG => 0;
    sub GAK {
        warn if DEBUG;
        print "stuff\n";
    }

the ops for warn if DEBUG would be folded to a null op (ex-const), but the nextstate op would remain, resulting in a runtime op dispatch of nextstate, nextstate, etc.

The execution of a sequence of nextstate ops is indistinguishable from just the last nextstate op so the peephole optimizer now eliminates the first of a pair of nextstate ops except when the first carries a label, since labels must not be eliminated by the optimizer, and label usage isn't conclusively known at compile time.


Modules and Pragmata

New Modules and Pragmata

Updated Modules and Pragma

Removed Modules and Pragmata

As promised in Perl 5.12.0's release notes, the following modules have been removed from the core distribution, and if needed should be installed from CPAN instead.

The removal of the Shell manpage has been deferred until after 5.14, as the implementation of the Shell manpage shipped with 5.12.0 did not correctly issue the warning that it was to be removed from core.


Documentation

New Documentation

the perlgpl manpage

the perlgpl manpage has been updated to contain GPL version 1, as is included in the README distributed with Perl (5.12.1).

Perl 5.12.x delta files

The perldelta files for Perl 5.12.1 to 5.12.3 have been added from the maintenance branch: the perl5121delta manpage, the perl5122delta manpage, the perl5123delta manpage.

the perlpodstyle manpage

New style guide for POD documentation, split mostly from the NOTES section of the pod2man(1) manpage.

the perlsource manpage, the perlinterp manpage, the perlhacktut manpage, and the perlhacktips manpage

See perlhack and perlrepository revamp, below.

Changes to Existing Documentation

perlmodlib is now complete

The perlmodlib manpage that came with Perl 5.12.0 was missing several modules due to a bug in the script that generates the list. This has been fixed [perl #74332] (5.12.1).

Replace incorrect tr/// table in the perlebcdic manpage

the perlebcdic manpage contains a helpful table to use in tr/// to convert between EBCDIC and Latin1/ASCII. The table was the inverse of the one it describes, though the code that used the table worked correctly for the specific example given.

The table has been corrected and the sample code changed to correspond.

The table has also been changed to hex from octal, and the recipes in the pod have been altered to print out leading zeros to make all values the same length.

Tricks for user-defined casing

the perlunicode manpage now contains an explanation of how to override, mangle and otherwise tweak the way Perl handles upper-, lower- and other-case conversions on Unicode data, and how to provide scoped changes to alter one's own code's behaviour without stomping on anybody else's.

INSTALL explicitly states that Perl requires a C89 compiler

This was already true, but it's now Officially Stated For The Record (5.12.2).

Explanation of \xHH and \oOOO escapes

the perlop manpage has been updated with more detailed explanation of these two character escapes.

-0NNN switch

In the perlrun manpage, the behaviour of the -0NNN switch for -0400 or higher has been clarified (5.12.2).

Maintenance policy

the perlpolicy manpage now contains the policy on what patches are acceptable for maintenance branches (5.12.1).

Deprecation policy

the perlpolicy manpage now contains the policy on compatibility and deprecation along with definitions of terms like ``deprecation'' (5.12.2).

New descriptions in the perldiag manpage

The following existing diagnostics are now documented:

the perlbook manpage

the perlbook manpage has been expanded to cover many more popular books.

SvTRUE macro

The documentation for the SvTRUE macro in perlapi was simply wrong in stating that get-magic is not processed. It has been corrected.

op manipulation functions

Several API functions that process optrees have been newly documented.

the perlvar manpage revamp

the perlvar manpage reorders the variables and groups them by topic. Each variable introduced after Perl 5.000 notes the first version in which it is available. the perlvar manpage also has a new section for deprecated variables to note when they were removed.

Array and hash slices in scalar context

These are now documented in the perldata manpage.

use locale and formats

the perlform manpage and the perllocale manpage have been corrected to state that use locale affects formats.

the overload manpage

the overload manpage's documentation has practically undergone a rewrite. It is now much more straightforward and clear.

perlhack and perlrepository revamp

The the perlhack manpage document is now much shorter, and focuses on the Perl 5 development process and submitting patches to Perl. The technical content has been moved to several new documents, the perlsource manpage, the perlinterp manpage, the perlhacktut manpage, and the perlhacktips manpage. This technical content has been only lightly edited.

The perlrepository document has been renamed to the perlgit manpage. This new document is just a how-to on using git with the Perl source code. Any other content that used to be in perlrepository has been moved to the perlhack manpage.

Time::Piece examples

Examples in the perlfaq4 manpage have been updated to show the use of the Time::Piece manpage.


Diagnostics

The following additions or changes have been made to diagnostic output, including warnings and fatal error messages. For the complete list of diagnostic messages, see the perldiag manpage.

New Diagnostics

New Errors

Closure prototype called
This error occurs when a subroutine reference passed to an attribute handler is called, if the subroutine is a closure [perl #68560].

Insecure user-defined property %s
Perl detected tainted data when trying to compile a regular expression that contains a call to a user-defined character property function, meaning \p{IsFoo} or \p{InFoo}. See User-Defined Character Properties in the perlunicode manpage and the perlsec manpage.

panic: gp_free failed to free glob pointer - something is repeatedly re-creating entries
This new error is triggered if a destructor called on an object in a typeglob that is being freed creates a new typeglob entry containing an object with a destructor that creates a new entry containing an object etc.

Parsing code internal error (%s)
This new fatal error is produced when parsing code supplied by an extension violates the parser's API in a detectable way.

refcnt: fd %d%s
This new error only occurs if an internal consistency check fails when a pipe is about to be closed.

Regexp modifier ``/%c'' may not appear twice
The regular expression pattern has one of the mutually exclusive modifiers repeated.

Regexp modifiers ``/%c'' and ``/%c'' are mutually exclusive
The regular expression pattern has more than one of the mutually exclusive modifiers.

Using !~ with %s doesn't make sense
This error occurs when !~ is used with s///r or y///r.

New Warnings

``\b{'' is deprecated; use ``\b\{'' instead
``\B{'' is deprecated; use ``\B\{'' instead
Use of an unescaped ``{'' immediately following a \b or \B is now deprecated in order to reserve its use for Perl itself in a future release.

Operation ``%s'' returns its argument for ...
Performing an operation requiring Unicode semantics (such as case-folding) on a Unicode surrogate or a non-Unicode character now triggers this warning.

Use of qw(...) as parentheses is deprecated
See Use of qw(...) as parentheses, above, for details.

Changes to Existing Diagnostics


Utility Changes

perlbug(1)

perl5db.pl

the ptargrep manpage


Configuration and Compilation

See also Naming fixes in Policy_sh.SH may invalidate Policy.sh, above.


Platform Support

New Platforms

AIX
Perl now builds on AIX 4.2 (5.12.1).

Discontinued Platforms

Apollo DomainOS
The last vestiges of support for this platform have been excised from the Perl distribution. It was officially discontinued in version 5.12.0. It had not worked for years before that.

MacOS Classic
The last vestiges of support for this platform have been excised from the Perl distribution. It was officially discontinued in an earlier version.

Platform-Specific Notes

AIX

ARM

Cygwin

FreeBSD 7

HP-UX

IRIX

Mac OS X

MirBSD

NetBSD

OpenBSD

OpenVOS

Solaris

VMS

Windows

See also fork() emulation will not wait for signalled children and Perl source code is read in text mode on Windows, above.


Internal Changes

New APIs

CLONE_PARAMS structure added to ease correct thread creation

Modules that create threads should now create CLONE_PARAMS structures by calling the new function Perl_clone_params_new(), and free them with Perl_clone_params_del(). This will ensure compatibility with any future changes to the internals of the CLONE_PARAMS structure layout, and that it is correctly allocated and initialised.

New parsing functions

Several functions have been added for parsing Perl statements and expressions. These functions are meant to be used by XS code invoked during Perl parsing, in a recursive-descent manner, to allow modules to augment the standard Perl syntax.

Hints hash API

A new C API for introspecting the hinthash %^H at runtime has been added. See cop_hints_2hv, cop_hints_fetchpvn, cop_hints_fetchpvs, cop_hints_fetchsv, and hv_copy_hints_hv in perlapi for details.

A new, experimental API has been added for accessing the internal structure that Perl uses for %^H. See the functions beginning with cophh_ in perlapi.

C interface to caller()

The caller_cx function has been added as an XSUB-writer's equivalent of caller(). See perlapi for details.

Custom per-subroutine check hooks

XS code in an extension module can now annotate a subroutine (whether implemented in XS or in Perl) so that nominated XS code will be called at compile time (specifically as part of op checking) to change the op tree of that subroutine. The compile-time check function (supplied by the extension module) can implement argument processing that can't be expressed as a prototype, generate customised compile-time warnings, perform constant folding for a pure function, inline a subroutine consisting of sufficiently simple ops, replace the whole call with a custom op, and so on. This was previously all possible by hooking the entersub op checker, but the new mechanism makes it easy to tie the hook to a specific subroutine. See perlapi/cv_set_call_checker.

To help in writing custom check hooks, several subtasks within standard entersub op checking have been separated out and exposed in the API.

Improved support for custom OPs

Custom ops can now be registered with the new custom_op_register C function and the XOP structure. This will make it easier to add new properties of custom ops in the future. Two new properties have been added already, xop_class and xop_peep.

xop_class is one of the OA_*OP constants. It allows the B manpage and other introspection mechanisms to work with custom ops that aren't BASEOPs. xop_peep is a pointer to a function that will be called for ops of this type from Perl_rpeep.

See Custom Operators in the perlguts manpage and perlapi/Custom Operators for more detail.

The old PL_custom_op_names/PL_custom_op_descs interface is still supported but discouraged.

Scope hooks

It is now possible for XS code to hook into Perl's lexical scope mechanism at compile time, using the new Perl_blockhook_register function. See Compile-time scope hooks in the perlguts manpage.

The recursive part of the peephole optimizer is now hookable

In addition to PL_peepp, for hooking into the toplevel peephole optimizer, a PL_rpeepp is now available to hook into the optimizer recursing into side-chains of the optree.

New non-magical variants of existing functions

The following functions/macros have been added to the API. The *_nomg macros are equivalent to their non-_nomg variants, except that they ignore get-magic. Those ending in _flags allow one to specify whether get-magic is processed.

  sv_2bool_flags
  SvTRUE_nomg
  sv_2nv_flags
  SvNV_nomg
  sv_cmp_flags
  sv_cmp_locale_flags
  sv_eq_flags
  sv_collxfrm_flags

In some of these cases, the non-_flags functions have been replaced with wrappers around the new functions.

pv/pvs/sv versions of existing functions

Many functions ending with pvn now have equivalent pv/pvs/sv versions.

List op-building functions

List op-building functions have been added to the API. See op_append_elem, op_append_list, and op_prepend_elem in perlapi.

LINKLIST

The LINKLIST macro, part of op building that constructs the execution-order op chain, has been added to the API.

Localisation functions

The save_freeop, save_op, save_pushi32ptr and save_pushptrptr functions have been added to the API.

Stash names

A stash can now have a list of effective names in addition to its usual name. The first effective name can be accessed via the HvENAME macro, which is now the recommended name to use in MRO linearisations (HvNAME being a fallback if there is no HvENAME).

These names are added and deleted via hv_ename_add and hv_ename_delete. These two functions are not part of the API.

New functions for finding and removing magic

The mg_findext() and sv_unmagicext() functions have been added to the API. They allow extension authors to find and remove magic attached to scalars based on both the magic type and the magic virtual table, similar to how sv_magicext() attaches magic of a certain type and with a given virtual table to a scalar. This eliminates the need for extensions to walk the list of MAGIC pointers of an SV to find the magic that belongs to them.

find_rundefsv

This function returns the SV representing $_, whether it's lexical or dynamic.

Perl_croak_no_modify

Perl_croak_no_modify() is short-hand for Perl_croak("%s", PL_no_modify).

PERL_STATIC_INLINE define

The PERL_STATIC_INLINE define has been added to provide the best-guess incantation to use for static inline functions, if the C compiler supports C99-style static inline. If it doesn't, it'll give a plain static.

HAS_STATIC_INLINE can be used to check if the compiler actually supports inline functions.

New pv_escape option for hexadecimal escapes

A new option, PERL_PV_ESCAPE_NONASCII, has been added to pv_escape to dump all characters above ASCII in hexadecimal. Before, one could get all characters as hexadecimal or the Latin1 non-ASCII as octal.

lex_start

lex_start has been added to the API, but is considered experimental.

op_scope() and op_lvalue()

The op_scope() and op_lvalue() functions have been added to the API, but are considered experimental.

C API Changes

PERL_POLLUTE has been removed

The option to define PERL_POLLUTE to expose older 5.005 symbols for backwards compatibility has been removed. Its use was always discouraged, and MakeMaker contains a more specific escape hatch:

    perl Makefile.PL POLLUTE=1

This can be used for modules that have not been upgraded to 5.6 naming conventions (and really should be completely obsolete by now).

Check API compatibility when loading XS modules

When Perl's API changes in incompatible ways (which usually happens between major releases), XS modules compiled for previous versions of Perl will no longer work. They need to be recompiled against the new Perl.

The XS_APIVERSION_BOOTCHECK macro has been added to ensure that modules are recompiled and to prevent users from accidentally loading modules compiled for old perls into newer perls. That macro, which is called when loading every newly compiled extension, compares the API version of the running perl with the version a module has been compiled for and raises an exception if they don't match.

Perl_fetch_cop_label

The first argument of the C API function Perl_fetch_cop_label has changed from struct refcounted_he * to COP *, to insulate the user from implementation details.

This API function was marked as ``may change'', and likely isn't in use outside the core. (Neither an unpacked CPAN nor Google's codesearch finds any other references to it.)

GvCV() and GvGP() are no longer lvalues

The new GvCV_set() and GvGP_set() macros are now provided to replace assignment to those two macros.

This allows a future commit to eliminate some backref magic between GV and CVs, which will require complete control over assignment to the gp_cv slot.

CvGV() is no longer an lvalue

Under some circumstances, the CvGV() field of a CV is now reference-counted. To ensure consistent behaviour, direct assignment to it, for example CvGV(cv) = gv is now a compile-time error. A new macro, CvGV_set(cv,gv) has been introduced to run this operation safely. Note that modification of this field is not part of the public API, regardless of this new macro (and despite its being listed in this section).

CvSTASH() is no longer an lvalue

The CvSTASH() macro can now only be used as an rvalue. CvSTASH_set() has been added to replace assignment to CvSTASH(). This is to ensure that backreferences are handled properly. These macros are not part of the API.

Calling conventions for newFOROP and newWHILEOP

The way the parser handles labels has been cleaned up and refactored. As a result, the newFOROP() constructor function no longer takes a parameter stating what label is to go in the state op.

The newWHILEOP() and newFOROP() functions no longer accept a line number as a parameter.

Flags passed to uvuni_to_utf8_flags and utf8n_to_uvuni

Some of the flags parameters to uvuni_to_utf8_flags() and utf8n_to_uvuni() have changed. This is a result of Perl's now allowing internal storage and manipulation of code points that are problematic in some situations. Hence, the default actions for these functions has been complemented to allow these code points. The new flags are documented in perlapi. Code that requires the problematic code points to be rejected needs to change to use the new flags. Some flag names are retained for backward source compatibility, though they do nothing, as they are now the default. However the flags UNICODE_ALLOW_FDD0, UNICODE_ALLOW_FFFF, UNICODE_ILLEGAL, and UNICODE_IS_ILLEGAL have been removed, as they stem from a fundamentally broken model of how the Unicode non-character code points should be handled, which is now described in Non-character code points in the perlunicode manpage. See also the Unicode section under Selected Bug Fixes.

Deprecated C APIs

Perl_ptr_table_clear
Perl_ptr_table_clear is no longer part of Perl's public API. Calling it now generates a deprecation warning, and it will be removed in a future release.

sv_compile_2op
The sv_compile_2op() API function is now deprecated. Searches suggest that nothing on CPAN is using it, so this should have zero impact.

It attempted to provide an API to compile code down to an optree, but failed to bind correctly to lexicals in the enclosing scope. It's not possible to fix this problem within the constraints of its parameters and return value.

find_rundefsvoffset
The find_rundefsvoffset function has been deprecated. It appeared that its design was insufficient for reliably getting the lexical $_ at run-time.

Use the new find_rundefsv function or the UNDERBAR macro instead. They directly return the right SV representing $_, whether it's lexical or dynamic.

CALL_FPTR and CPERLscope
Those are left from an old implementation of MULTIPLICITY using C++ objects, which was removed in Perl 5.8. Nowadays these macros do exactly nothing, so they shouldn't be used anymore.

For compatibility, they are still defined for external XS code. Only extensions defining PERL_CORE must be updated now.

Other Internal Changes

Stack unwinding

The protocol for unwinding the C stack at the last stage of a die has changed how it identifies the target stack frame. This now uses a separate variable PL_restartjmpenv, where previously it relied on the blk_eval.cur_top_env pointer in the eval context frame that has nominally just been discarded. This change means that code running during various stages of Perl-level unwinding no longer needs to take care to avoid destroying the ghost frame.

Scope stack entries

The format of entries on the scope stack has been changed, resulting in a reduction of memory usage of about 10%. In particular, the memory used by the scope stack to record each active lexical variable has been halved.

Memory allocation for pointer tables

Memory allocation for pointer tables has been changed. Previously Perl_ptr_table_store allocated memory from the same arena system as SV bodies and HEs, with freed memory remaining bound to those arenas until interpreter exit. Now it allocates memory from arenas private to the specific pointer table, and that memory is returned to the system when Perl_ptr_table_free is called. Additionally, allocation and release are both less CPU intensive.

UNDERBAR

The UNDERBAR macro now calls find_rundefsv. dUNDERBAR is now a noop but should still be used to ensure past and future compatibility.

String comparison routines renamed

The ibcmp_* functions have been renamed and are now called foldEQ, foldEQ_locale, and foldEQ_utf8. The old names are still available as macros.

chop and chomp implementations merged

The opcode bodies for chop and chomp and for schop and schomp have been merged. The implementation functions Perl_do_chop() and Perl_do_chomp(), never part of the public API, have been merged and moved to a static function in pp.c. This shrinks the Perl binary slightly, and should not affect any code outside the core (unless it is relying on the order of side-effects when chomp is passed a list of values).


Selected Bug Fixes

I/O

Regular Expression Bug Fixes

Syntax/Parsing Bugs

Stashes, Globs and Method Lookup

Perl 5.10.0 introduced a new internal mechanism for caching MROs (method resolution orders, or lists of parent classes; aka ``isa'' caches) to make method lookup faster (so @ISA arrays would not have to be searched repeatedly). Unfortunately, this brought with it quite a few bugs. Almost all of these have been fixed now, along with a few MRO-related bugs that existed before 5.10.0:

In addition, various other bugs related to typeglobs and stashes have been fixed:

Unicode

Ties, Overloading and Other Magic

The Debugger

Threads

Scoping and Subroutines

Signals

Miscellaneous Memory Leaks

Memory Corruption and Crashes

Fixes to Various Perl Operators

Bugs Relating to the C API


Known Problems

This is a list of significant unresolved issues which are regressions from earlier versions of Perl or which affect widely-used CPAN modules.


Errata

keys(), values(), and each() work on arrays

You can now use the keys(), values(), and each() builtins on arrays; previously you could use them only on hashes. See the perlfunc manpage for details. This is actually a change introduced in perl 5.12.0, but it was missed from that release's the perl5120delta manpage.

split() and @_

split() no longer modifies @_ when called in scalar or void context. In void context it now produces a ``Useless use of split'' warning. This was also a perl 5.12.0 change that missed the perldelta.


Obituary

Randy Kobes, creator of http://kobesearch.cpan.org/ and contributor/maintainer to several core Perl toolchain modules, passed away on September 18, 2010 after a battle with lung cancer. The community was richer for his involvement. He will be missed.


Acknowledgements

Perl 5.14.0 represents one year of development since Perl 5.12.0 and contains nearly 550,000 lines of changes across nearly 3,000 files from 150 authors and committers.

Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.14.0:

Aaron Crane, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Abigail, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Alastair Douglas, Alexander Alekseev, Alexander Hartmaier, Alexandr Ciornii, Alex Davies, Alex Vandiver, Ali Polatel, Allen Smith, Andreas König, Andrew Rodland, Andy Armstrong, Andy Dougherty, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Arkturuz, Arvan, A. Sinan Unur, Ben Morrow, Bo Lindbergh, Boris Ratner, Brad Gilbert, Bram, brian d foy, Brian Phillips, Casey West, Charles Bailey, Chas. Owens, Chip Salzenberg, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, chromatic, Craig A. Berry, Curtis Jewell, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, Dan Dascalescu, Dave Rolsky, David Caldwell, David Cantrell, David Golden, David Leadbeater, David Mitchell, David Wheeler, Eric Brine, Father Chrysostomos, Fingle Nark, Florian Ragwitz, Frank Wiegand, Franz Fasching, Gene Sullivan, George Greer, Gerard Goossen, Gisle Aas, Goro Fuji, Grant McLean, gregor herrmann, H.Merijn Brand, Hongwen Qiu, Hugo van der Sanden, Ian Goodacre, James E Keenan, James Mastros, Jan Dubois, Jay Hannah, Jerry D. Hedden, Jesse Vincent, Jim Cromie, Jirka Hruška, John Peacock, Joshua ben Jore, Joshua Pritikin, Karl Williamson, Kevin Ryde, kmx, Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ 迪拉斯, Larwan Berke, Leon Brocard, Leon Timmermans, Lubomir Rintel, Lukas Mai, Maik Hentsche, Marty Pauley, Marvin Humphrey, Matt Johnson, Matt S Trout, Max Maischein, Michael Breen, Michael Fig, Michael G Schwern, Michael Parker, Michael Stevens, Michael Witten, Mike Kelly, Moritz Lenz, Nicholas Clark, Nick Cleaton, Nick Johnston, Nicolas Kaiser, Niko Tyni, Noirin Shirley, Nuno Carvalho, Paul Evans, Paul Green, Paul Johnson, Paul Marquess, Peter J. Holzer, Peter John Acklam, Peter Martini, Philippe Bruhat (BooK), Piotr Fusik, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Rainer Tammer, Reini Urban, Renee Baecker, Ricardo Signes, Richard Möhn, Richard Soderberg, Rob Hoelz, Robin Barker, Ruslan Zakirov, Salvador Fandiño, Salvador Ortiz Garcia, Shlomi Fish, Sinan Unur, Sisyphus, Slaven Rezic, Steffen Müller, Steve Hay, Steven Schubiger, Steve Peters, Sullivan Beck, Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, Tim Bunce, Todd Rinaldo, Tom Christiansen, Tom Hukins, Tony Cook, Tye McQueen, Vadim Konovalov, Vernon Lyon, Vincent Pit, Walt Mankowski, Wolfram Humann, Yves Orton, Zefram, and Zsbán Ambrus.

This is woefully incomplete as it's automatically generated from version control history. In particular, it doesn't include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who reported issues in previous versions of Perl that helped make Perl 5.14.0 better. For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors, please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl 5.14.0 distribution.

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish.


Reporting Bugs

If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the Perl bug database at http://rt.perl.org/perlbug/ . There may also be information at http://www.perl.org/ , the Perl Home Page.

If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug program included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the output of perl -V, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by the Perl porting team.

If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org. This points to a closed subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core committers, who are able to help assess the impact of issues, figure out a resolution, and help co-ordinate the release of patches to mitigate or fix the problem across all platforms on which Perl is supported. Please use this address for security issues in the Perl core only, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN.


SEE ALSO

The Changes file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details on what changed.

The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.

The README file for general stuff.

The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.

 perl5140delta - what is new for perl v5.14.0