perl5395delta - what is new for perl v5.39.5
This document describes differences between the 5.39.4 release and the 5.39.5 release.
If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.39.3, first read perl5394delta, which describes differences between 5.39.3 and 5.39.4.
glibc has an undocumented feature to return the current locale when using the POSIX 2008 locale API. This feature is now experimentally enabled by default so as to see if there are problems with it. This enabling expires in v5.39.10. In the meantime, if you run into problems, open a bug ticket and Configure with -Accflags=-DNO_NL_LOCALE_NAME to turn it off.
Using goto to jump from an outer scope into an inner scope is deprecated and will be removed completely in Perl 5.42. [GH #21601]
Benchmark has been upgraded from version 1.24 to 1.25.
builtin has been upgraded from version 0.011 to 0.012.
Added the load_module() builtin function as per PPC 0006.
Encode has been upgraded from version 3.19 to 3.20.
Getopt::Long has been upgraded from version 2.54 to 2.57.
IO has been upgraded from version 1.53 to 1.54.
Fixed IO::Handle/blocking on Windows, which has been non-functional since IO 1.32. [GH #17455]
locale has been upgraded from version 1.10 to 1.11.
Math::BigInt has been upgraded from version 1.999842 to 2.001000.
Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20231025 to 5.20231120.
POSIX has been upgraded from version 2.16 to 2.17.
Adjusted the signbit() on NaN test to handle the unusual bit pattern returned for NaN by Oracle Developer Studio's compiler. [GH #21533]
Term::Table has been upgraded from version 0.017 to 0.018.
Test2::Suite has been upgraded from version 0.000156 to 0.000159.
We have attempted to update the documentation to reflect the changes listed in this document. If you find any we have missed, open an issue at https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues.
Additionally, the following selected changes have been made:
The section on the empty pattern // has been amended to mention that the current dynamic scope is used to find the last successful match.
Tests were added and changed to reflect the other additions and changes in this release. Furthermore, these significant changes were made:
porting/globvar.t now uses the more portable nm -P ... to fetch the names defined in an object file. The parsing of the names found in the object is now separated from processing them to handle the duplication between local and global definitions on AIX. [GH #21637]
A test was added to lib/locale_threads.t that extensively stress tests locale handling. It turns out that the libc implementations on various platforms have bugs in this regard, including Linux, Windows, *BSD derivatives including Darwin, and others. Experimental versions of this test have been used in the past few years to find bugs in the Perl implementation and in those platforms, as well as to develop workarounds in the Perl implementation, where feasible, for the platform bugs. Multiple bug report tickets have been filed against platforms, and some have been fixed. The test checks that platforms that purport to support thread-safe locale handling actually do so (and that perl works properly on those that do; The read-only variable ${^SAFE_LOCALES} is set to 1 if perl thinks the platform can handle this, whatever the platform's documentation says).
Also tested for is if the various locale categories can indeed be set independently to disparate locales. (An example of where you might want to do this is if you are a Western Canadian living and working in Holland. You likely will want to have the LC_MONETARY locale be set to where you are living, but have the other parts of your locale retain your native English values. Later, as you get a bit more comfortable with Dutch, and in order to communicate better with your colleagues, you might want to change LC_TIME and LC_NUMERIC to Dutch, while leaving LC_CTYPE and LC_COLLATE set to English indefinitely.)
Due to an apparent code generation bug, the default optimization level for the Oracle Developer Studio (formerly Sun Workshop) compiler is now -xO1. [GH #21535]
Enable copysign, signbit, acosh, asinh, atanh, exp2, tgamma in the bundled configuration used for MSVC. [GH #21610]
The build process no longer supports Visual Studio 2013. This was failing to build at a very basic level and there has been no reports of such failures. [GH #21624]
perl5300delta has been updated to include the removal of the arybase module that happened at the same time as the removal of $[.
Perl 5.39.5 represents approximately 4 weeks of development since Perl 5.39.4 and contains approximately 12,000 lines of changes across 330 files from 17 authors.
Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 8,200 lines of changes to 270 .pm, .t, .c and .h files.
Perl continues to flourish into its fourth decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.39.5:
Chad Granum, Dan Kogai, E. Choroba, Elvin Aslanov, Graham Knop, Hugo van der Sanden, James E Keenan, Johan Vromans, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, Leon Timmermans, Lukas Mai, Marco Fontani, Paul Evans, Peter John Acklam, Tony Cook, Yves Orton.
The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically generated from version control history. In particular, it does not include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.
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.
For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors, please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.
If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the perl bug database at https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues. There may also be information at http://www.perl.org/, the Perl Home Page.
If you believe you have an unreported bug, please open an issue at https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case.
If the bug you are reporting has security implications which make it inappropriate to send to a public issue tracker, then see "SECURITY VULNERABILITY CONTACT INFORMATION" in perlsec for details of how to report the issue.
If you wish to thank the Perl 5 Porters for the work we had done in Perl 5, you can do so by running the perlthanks program:
perlthanksThis will send an email to the Perl 5 Porters list with your show of thanks.
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.