/ 
perl-5.31.8
River stage five • 11849 direct dependents • 33721 total dependents
/ perldelta

NAME

perldelta - what is new for perl v5.31.8

DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.31.7 release and the 5.31.8 release.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.31.6, first read perl5317delta, which describes differences between 5.31.6 and 5.31.7.

Notice

We are now in the Contentious Changes Freeze portion of the 5.31.X release cycle.

Performance Enhancements

  • my_strnlen has been sped up for systems that don't have their own strnlen implementation.

  • grok_bin_oct_hex (and so, grok_bin, grok_oct, and grok_hex) have been sped up.

  • grok_number_flags has been sped up.

Modules and Pragmata

Updated Modules and Pragmata

  • autodie has been upgraded from version 2.29 to 2.32.

  • DB_File has been upgraded from version 1.852 to 1.853.

  • Encode has been upgraded from version 3.01 to 3.02.

  • ExtUtils::MakeMaker has been upgraded from version 7.42 to 7.44.

  • Hash::Util has been upgraded from version 0.22 to 0.23.

    The Synopsis has been updated as the example code stopped working with newer perls.

    [GH #17399]

  • IO has been upgraded from version 1.41 to 1.42.

  • Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20191220 to 5.20200120.

  • podlators has been upgraded from version 4.12 to 4.14.

  • POSIX has been upgraded from version 1.90 to 1.91.

  • Term::ANSIColor has been upgraded from version 4.06 to 5.01.

  • Test::Simple has been upgraded from version 1.302170 to 1.302171.

  • XS::APItest has been upgraded from version 1.05 to 1.06.

Documentation

Changes to Existing Documentation

We have attempted to update the documentation to reflect the changes listed in this document. If you find any we have missed, send email to https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues.

Additionally, the following selected changes have been made:

perlapi

  • sv_2pvbyte updated to mention it will croak if the SV cannot be downgraded.

  • sv_setpvn updated to mention that the UTF-8 flag will not be changed by this function, and a terminating NUL byte is guaranteed.

  • Documentation for PL_phase has been added.

  • The documentation for grok_bin, grok_oct, and grok_hex has been updated and clarified.

perlguts

  • Don't suggest using perl's malloc anymore. Modern system malloc is assumed to be much better than perl's implementation at this point.

perlintro

  • The docs for the repetition operator x have been clarified

    [GH #17335]

perlipc

  • The documentation surrounding open and handle usage has been modernized to prefer 3-arg open and lexical variables instead of barewords.

  • Various updates and fixes including making all examples strict-safe and replacing -w with use warnings.

perlport

  • Update timegm example to use correct year format 1970 instead of 70.

    [GH #16431]

perlvar

  • Recommend stringifying $] and comparing it numerically.

perlxs

  • Suggest using libffi for simple library bindings.

POSIX

  • setlocale warning about threaded builds updated to note it does not apply on Perl 5.28.X and later.

  • Posix::SigSet->new(...) updated to state it throws an error if any of the supplied signals cannot be added to the set.

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 perldiag.

Changes to Existing Diagnostics

  • The "Code point 0x%X is not Unicode, and not portable" warning removed the line "Code points above 0xFFFF_FFFF require larger than a 32 bit word." as code points that large are no longer legal on 32-bit platforms.

Configuration and Compilation

  • For clang++, add #include <stdlib.h> to Configure's probes for futimes, strtoll, strtoul, strtoull, strtouq, otherwise the probes would fail to compile.

  • Use a compile and run test for lchown to satisfy clang++ which should more reliably detect it.

  • For C++ compilers, add #include <stdio.h> to Configure's probes for getpgrp and setpgrp as they use printf and C++ compilers may fail compilation instead of just warning.

Testing

Tests were added and changed to reflect the other additions and changes in this release. Furthermore, these significant changes were made:

  • Certain test output of scalars containing control characters and Unicode has been fixed on EBCDIC.

Platform Support

Platform-Specific Notes

NetBSD 8.0

Fix compilation of Perl on NetBSD 8.0 with g++.

[GH #17381]

Solaris

Configure now uses the detected types for gethostby* functions, allowing Perl to once again compile on certain configurations of Solaris.

Internal Changes

  • savepvn's len parameter is now a Size_t instead of an I32 since we can handle longer strings than 31 bits.

Selected Bug Fixes

  • A heap-buffer-overflow has been fixed in the regular expression engine.

    [GH #17384]

  • Fix an assertion failure in the regular expression engine.

    [GH #17372]

  • Fix regression in tr/// added somewhere in v5.31.6.

    [GH #17391]

  • Fix coredump in pp_hot.c after B::UNOP_AUX::aux_list().

    [GH #17301]

  • Commit bc62bf8519 ("Add some defensive coding to av_store()" has been reverted as it broke List-UtilsBy-XS-0.05 in v5.31.2.

    [GH #17265]

  • Loading IO is now threadsafe.

    [GH #14816]

Acknowledgements

Perl 5.31.8 represents approximately 4 weeks of development since Perl 5.31.7 and contains approximately 16,000 lines of changes across 400 files from 25 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 8,300 lines of changes to 260 .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 5.31.8:

Andy Dougherty, Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chad Granum, Chase Whitener, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Dan Book, Dan Kogai, David Mitchell, Felipe Gasper, Hugo van der Sanden, James E Keenan, Karl Williamson, Matthew Horsfall, Nicholas Clark, Nicolas R., Ricardo Signes, Russ Allbery, Santtu Ojanperä, Slaven Rezic, Smylers, Todd Rinaldo, Tomasz Konojacki, 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.

Reporting Bugs

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.

Give Thanks

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:

perlthanks

This will send an email to the Perl 5 Porters list with your show of thanks.

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.