{ "mode": "man", "parameter": "perl5280delta", "section": "1", "url": "https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/man/perl5280delta/1/json", "generated": "2026-06-13T21:25:36Z", "sections": { "NAME": { "content": "perl5280delta - what is new for perl v5.28.0\n", "subsections": [] }, "DESCRIPTION": { "content": "This document describes differences between the 5.26.0 release and the 5.28.0 release.\n\nIf you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.24.0, first read perl5260delta, which\ndescribes differences between 5.24.0 and 5.26.0.\n", "subsections": [ { "name": "Core Enhancements", "content": "" }, { "name": "Unicode 10.0 is supported", "content": "A list of changes is at .\n" }, { "name": "\"delete\" on key/value hash slices", "content": "\"delete\" can now be used on key/value hash slices, returning the keys along with the deleted\nvalues. [GH #15982] \n" }, { "name": "Experimentally, there are now alphabetic synonyms for some regular expression assertions", "content": "If you find it difficult to remember how to write certain of the pattern assertions, there\nare now alphabetic synonyms.\n\nCURRENT NEW SYNONYMS\n------ ------------\n(?=...) (*pla:...) or (*positivelookahead:...)\n(?!...) (*nla:...) or (*negativelookahead:...)\n(?<=...) (*plb:...) or (*positivelookbehind:...)\n(?...) (*atomic:...)\n\nThese are considered experimental, so using any of these will raise (unless turned off) a\nwarning in the \"experimental::alphaassertions\" category.\n" }, { "name": "Mixed Unicode scripts are now detectable", "content": "A mixture of scripts, such as Cyrillic and Latin, in a string is often the sign of a spoofing\nattack. A new regular expression construct now allows for easy detection of these. For\nexample, you can say\n\nqr/(*scriptrun: \\d+ \\b )/x\n\nAnd the digits matched will all be from the same set of 10. You won't get a look-alike digit\nfrom a different script that has a different value than what it appears to be.\n\nOr:\n\nqr/(*sr: \\b \\w+ \\b )/x\n\nmakes sure that all the characters come from the same script.\n\nYou can also combine script runs with \"(?>...)\" (or \"*atomic:...)\").\n\nInstead of writing:\n\n(*sr:(?<...))\n\nyou can now run:\n\n(*asr:...)\n# or\n(*atomicscriptrun:...)\n\nThis is considered experimental, so using it will raise (unless turned off) a warning in the\n\"experimental::scriptrun\" category.\n\nSee \"Script Runs\" in perlre.\n" }, { "name": "In-place editing with \"perl -i\" is now safer", "content": "Previously in-place editing (\"perl -i\") would delete or rename the input file as soon as you\nstarted working on a new file.\n\nWithout backups this would result in loss of data if there was an error, such as a full disk,\nwhen writing to the output file.\n\nThis has changed so that the input file isn't replaced until the output file has been\ncompletely written and successfully closed.\n\nThis works by creating a work file in the same directory, which is renamed over the input\nfile once the output file is complete.\n\nIncompatibilities:\n\n• Since this renaming needs to only happen once, if you create a thread or child process,\nthat renaming will only happen in the original thread or process.\n\n• If you change directories while processing a file, and your operating system doesn't\nprovide the \"unlinkat()\", \"renameat()\" and \"fchmodat()\" functions, the final rename step\nmay fail.\n\n[GH #15216] \n" }, { "name": "Initialisation of aggregate state variables", "content": "A persistent lexical array or hash variable can now be initialized, by an expression such as\n\"state @a = qw(x y z)\". Initialization of a list of persistent lexical variables is still\nnot possible.\n" }, { "name": "Full-size inode numbers", "content": "On platforms where inode numbers are of a type larger than perl's native integer numerical\ntypes, stat will preserve the full content of large inode numbers by returning them in the\nform of strings of decimal digits. Exact comparison of inode numbers can thus be achieved by\ncomparing with \"eq\" rather than \"==\". Comparison with \"==\", and other numerical operations\n(which are usually meaningless on inode numbers), work as well as they did before, which is\nto say they fall back to floating point, and ultimately operate on a fairly useless rounded\ninode number if the real inode number is too big for the floating point format.\n" }, { "name": "The \"sprintf\" %j format size modifier is now available with pre-C99 compilers", "content": "The actual size used depends on the platform, so remains unportable.\n" }, { "name": "Close-on-exec flag set atomically", "content": "When opening a file descriptor, perl now generally opens it with its close-on-exec flag\nalready set, on platforms that support doing so. This improves thread safety, because it\nmeans that an \"exec\" initiated by one thread can no longer cause a file descriptor in the\nprocess of being opened by another thread to be accidentally passed to the executed program.\n\nAdditionally, perl now sets the close-on-exec flag more reliably, whether it does so\natomically or not. Most file descriptors were getting the flag set, but some were being\nmissed.\n" }, { "name": "String- and number-specific bitwise ops are no longer experimental", "content": "The new string-specific (\"&. |. ^. ~.\") and number-specific (\"& | ^ ~\") bitwise operators\nintroduced in Perl 5.22 that are available within the scope of \"use feature 'bitwise'\" are no\nlonger experimental. Because the number-specific ops are spelled the same way as the\nexisting operators that choose their behaviour based on their operands, these operators must\nstill be enabled via the \"bitwise\" feature, in either of these two ways:\n\nuse feature \"bitwise\";\n\nuse v5.28; # \"bitwise\" now included\n\nThey are also now enabled by the -E command-line switch.\n\nThe \"bitwise\" feature no longer emits a warning. Existing code that disables the\n\"experimental::bitwise\" warning category that the feature previously used will continue to\nwork.\n\nOne caveat that module authors ought to be aware of is that the numeric operators now pass a\nfifth TRUE argument to overload methods. Any methods that check the number of operands may\ncroak if they do not expect so many. XS authors in particular should be aware that this:\n\nSV *\nbitophandler (lobj, robj, swap)\n\nmay need to be changed to this:\n\nSV *\nbitophandler (lobj, robj, swap, ...)\n" }, { "name": "Locales are now thread-safe on systems that support them", "content": "These systems include Windows starting with Visual Studio 2005, and in POSIX 2008 systems.\n\nThe implication is that you are now free to use locales and change them in a threaded\nenvironment. Your changes affect only your thread. See \"Multi-threaded operation\" in\nperllocale\n\nNew read-only predefined variable \"${^SAFELOCALES}\"\nThis variable is 1 if the Perl interpreter is operating in an environment where it is safe to\nuse and change locales (see perllocale.) This variable is true when the perl is unthreaded,\nor compiled in a platform that supports thread-safe locale operation (see previous item).\n" } ] }, "Security": { "content": "", "subsections": [ { "name": "[CVE-2017-12837] Heap buffer overflow in regular expression compiler", "content": "Compiling certain regular expression patterns with the case-insensitive modifier could cause\na heap buffer overflow and crash perl. This has now been fixed. [GH #16021]\n\n" }, { "name": "[CVE-2017-12883] Buffer over-read in regular expression parser", "content": "For certain types of syntax error in a regular expression pattern, the error message could\neither contain the contents of a random, possibly large, chunk of memory, or could crash\nperl. This has now been fixed. [GH #16025] \n" }, { "name": "[CVE-2017-12814] $ENV{$key} stack buffer overflow on Windows", "content": "A possible stack buffer overflow in the %ENV code on Windows has been fixed by removing the\nbuffer completely since it was superfluous anyway. [GH #16051]\n\n" }, { "name": "Default Hash Function Change", "content": "Perl 5.28.0 retires various older hash functions which are not viewed as sufficiently secure\nfor use in Perl. We now support four general purpose hash functions, Siphash (2-4 and 1-3\nvariants), and Zaphod32, and StadtX hash. In addition we support SBOX32 (a form of tabular\nhashing) for hashing short strings, in conjunction with any of the other hash functions\nprovided.\n\nBy default Perl is configured to support SBOX hashing of strings up to 24 characters, in\nconjunction with StadtX hashing on 64 bit builds, and Zaphod32 hashing for 32 bit builds.\n\nYou may control these settings with the following options to Configure:\n\n-DPERLHASHFUNCSIPHASH\n-DPERLHASHFUNCSIPHASH13\n-DPERLHASHFUNCSTADTX\n-DPERLHASHFUNCZAPHOD32\n\nTo disable SBOX hashing you can use\n\n-DPERLHASHUSESBOX32ALSO=0\n\nAnd to set the maximum length to use SBOX32 hashing on with:\n\n-DSBOX32MAXLEN=16\n\nThe maximum length allowed is 256. There probably isn't much point in setting it higher than\nthe default.\n" }, { "name": "Incompatible Changes", "content": "" }, { "name": "Subroutine attribute and signature order", "content": "The experimental subroutine signatures feature has been changed so that subroutine attributes\nmust now come before the signature rather than after. This is because attributes like\n\":lvalue\" can affect the compilation of code within the signature, for example:\n\nsub f :lvalue ($a = do { $x = \"abc\"; return substr($x,0,1)}) { ...}\n\nNote that this the second time they have been flipped:\n\nsub f :lvalue ($a, $b) { ... }; # 5.20; 5.28 onwards\nsub f ($a, $b) :lvalue { ... }; # 5.22 - 5.26\n" }, { "name": "Comma-less variable lists in formats are no longer allowed", "content": "Omitting the commas between variables passed to formats is no longer allowed. This has been\ndeprecated since Perl 5.000.\n" }, { "name": "The \":locked\" and \":unique\" attributes have been removed", "content": "These have been no-ops and deprecated since Perl 5.12 and 5.10, respectively.\n" }, { "name": "\"\\N{}\" with nothing between the braces is now illegal", "content": "This has been deprecated since Perl 5.24.\n" }, { "name": "Opening the same symbol as both a file and directory handle is no longer allowed", "content": "Using \"open()\" and \"opendir()\" to associate both a filehandle and a dirhandle to the same\nsymbol (glob or scalar) has been deprecated since Perl 5.10.\n" }, { "name": "Use of bare \"<<\" to mean \"<<\"\"\" is no longer allowed", "content": "Use of a bare terminator has been deprecated since Perl 5.000.\n" }, { "name": "Setting $/ to a reference to a non-positive integer no longer allowed", "content": "This used to work like setting it to \"undef\", but has been deprecated since Perl 5.20.\n\nUnicode code points with values exceeding \"IVMAX\" are now fatal\nThis was deprecated since Perl 5.24.\n" }, { "name": "The \"B::OP::terse\" method has been removed", "content": "Use \"B::Concise::bterse\" instead.\n" }, { "name": "Use of inherited AUTOLOAD for non-methods is no longer allowed", "content": "This was deprecated in Perl 5.004.\n" }, { "name": "Use of strings with code points over 0xFF is not allowed for bitwise string operators", "content": "Code points over 0xFF do not make sense for bitwise operators and such an operation will now\ncroak, except for a few remaining cases. See perldeprecation.\n\nThis was deprecated in Perl 5.24.\n" }, { "name": "Setting \"${^ENCODING}\" to a defined value is now illegal", "content": "This has been deprecated since Perl 5.22 and a no-op since Perl 5.26.\n" }, { "name": "Backslash no longer escapes colon in PATH for the \"-S\" switch", "content": "Previously the \"-S\" switch incorrectly treated backslash (\"\\\") as an escape for colon when\ntraversing the \"PATH\" environment variable. [GH #15584]\n\n\nthe -DH (DEBUGH) misfeature has been removed\nOn a perl built with debugging support, the \"H\" flag to the \"-D\" debugging option has been\nremoved. This was supposed to dump hash values, but has been broken for many years.\n" }, { "name": "Yada-yada is now strictly a statement", "content": "By the time of its initial stable release in Perl 5.12, the \"...\" (yada-yada) operator was\nexplicitly intended to serve as a statement, not an expression. However, the original\nimplementation was confused on this point, leading to inconsistent parsing. The operator was\naccidentally accepted in a few situations where it did not serve as a complete statement,\nsuch as\n\n... . \"foo\";\n... if $a < $b;\n\nThe parsing has now been made consistent, permitting yada-yada only as a statement. Affected\ncode can use \"do{...}\" to put a yada-yada into an arbitrary expression context.\n" }, { "name": "Sort algorithm can no longer be specified", "content": "Since Perl 5.8, the sort pragma has had subpragmata \"mergesort\", \"quicksort\", and \"qsort\"\nthat can be used to specify which algorithm perl should use to implement the sort builtin.\nThis was always considered a dubious feature that might not last, hence the underscore\nspellings, and they were documented as not being portable beyond Perl 5.8. These subpragmata\nhave now been deleted, and any attempt to use them is an error. The sort pragma otherwise\nremains, and the algorithm-neutral \"stable\" subpragma can be used to control sorting\nbehaviour. [GH #13234] \n" }, { "name": "Over-radix digits in floating point literals", "content": "Octal and binary floating point literals used to permit any hexadecimal digit to appear after\nthe radix point. The digits are now restricted to those appropriate for the radix, as digits\nbefore the radix point always were.\n" }, { "name": "Return type of \"unpackstring()\"", "content": "The return types of the C API functions \"unpackstring()\" and \"unpackstr()\" have changed from\n\"I32\" to \"SSizet\", in order to accommodate datasets of more than two billion items.\n" } ] }, "Deprecations": { "content": "", "subsections": [ { "name": "Use of \"vec\" on strings with code points above 0xFF is deprecated", "content": "Such strings are represented internally in UTF-8, and \"vec\" is a bit-oriented operation that\nwill likely give unexpected results on those strings.\n" }, { "name": "Some uses of unescaped \"{\" in regexes are no longer fatal", "content": "Perl 5.26.0 fatalized some uses of an unescaped left brace, but an exception was made at the\nlast minute, specifically crafted to be a minimal change to allow GNU Autoconf to work. That\ntool is heavily depended upon, and continues to use the deprecated usage. Its use of an\nunescaped left brace is one where we have no intention of repurposing \"{\" to be something\nother than itself.\n\nThat exception is now generalized to include various other such cases where the \"{\" will not\nbe repurposed.\n\nNote that these uses continue to raise a deprecation message.\n" }, { "name": "Use of unescaped \"{\" immediately after a \"(\" in regular expression patterns is deprecated", "content": "Using unescaped left braces is officially deprecated everywhere, but it is not enforced in\ncontexts where their use does not interfere with expected extensions to the language. A\ndeprecation is added in this release when the brace appears immediately after an opening\nparenthesis. Before this, even if the brace was part of a legal quantifier, it was not\ninterpreted as such, but as the literal characters, unlike other quantifiers that follow a\n\"(\" which are considered errors. Now, their use will raise a deprecation message, unless\nturned off.\n" }, { "name": "Assignment to $[ will be fatal in Perl 5.30", "content": "Assigning a non-zero value to $[ has been deprecated since Perl 5.12, but was never given a\ndeadline for removal. This has now been scheduled for Perl 5.30.\n" }, { "name": "hostname() won't accept arguments in Perl 5.32", "content": "Passing arguments to \"Sys::Hostname::hostname()\" was already deprecated, but didn't have a\nremoval date. This has now been scheduled for Perl 5.32. [GH #14662]\n\n" }, { "name": "Module removals", "content": "The following modules will be removed from the core distribution in a future release, and\nwill at that time need to be installed from CPAN. Distributions on CPAN which require these\nmodules will need to list them as prerequisites.\n\nThe core versions of these modules will now issue \"deprecated\"-category warnings to alert you\nto this fact. To silence these deprecation warnings, install the modules in question from\nCPAN.\n\nNote that these are (with rare exceptions) fine modules that you are encouraged to continue\nto use. Their disinclusion from core primarily hinges on their necessity to bootstrapping a\nfully functional, CPAN-capable Perl installation, not usually on concerns over their design.\n\nB::Debug\nLocale::Codes and its associated Country, Currency and Language modules\n" }, { "name": "Performance Enhancements", "content": "• The start up overhead for creating regular expression patterns with Unicode properties\n(\"\\p{...}\") has been greatly reduced in most cases.\n\n• Many string concatenation expressions are now considerably faster, due to the\nintroduction internally of a \"multiconcat\" opcode which combines multiple concatenations,\nand optionally a \"=\" or \".=\", into a single action. For example, apart from retrieving\n$s, $a and $b, this whole expression is now handled as a single op:\n\n$s .= \"a=$a b=$b\\n\"\n\nAs a special case, if the LHS of an assignment is a lexical variable or \"my $s\", the op\nitself handles retrieving the lexical variable, which is faster.\n\nIn general, the more the expression includes a mix of constant strings and variable\nexpressions, the longer the expression, and the more it mixes together non-utf8 and utf8\nstrings, the more marked the performance improvement. For example on a \"x8664\" system,\nthis code has been benchmarked running four times faster:\n\nmy $s;\nmy $a = \"ab\\x{100}cde\";\nmy $b = \"fghij\";\nmy $c = \"\\x{101}klmn\";\n\nfor my $i (1..10000000) {\n$s = \"\\x{100}wxyz\";\n$s .= \"foo=$a bar=$b baz=$c\";\n}\n\nIn addition, \"sprintf\" expressions which have a constant format containing only %s and\n\"%%\" format elements, and which have a fixed number of arguments, are now also optimised\ninto a \"multiconcat\" op.\n\n• The \"ref()\" builtin is now much faster in boolean context, since it no longer bothers to\nconstruct a temporary string like \"Foo=ARRAY(0x134af48)\".\n\n• \"keys()\" in void and scalar contexts is now more efficient.\n\n• The common idiom of comparing the result of index() with -1 is now specifically\noptimised, e.g.\n\nif (index(...) != -1) { ... }\n\n• \"for()\" loops and similar constructs are now more efficient in most cases.\n\n• File::Glob has been modified to remove unnecessary backtracking and recursion, thanks to\nRuss Cox. See for more details.\n\n• The XS-level \"SvTRUE()\" API function is now more efficient.\n\n• Various integer-returning ops are now more efficient in scalar/boolean context.\n\n• Slightly improved performance when parsing stash names. [GH #15689]\n\n\n• Calls to \"require\" for an already loaded module are now slightly faster. [GH #16175]\n\n\n• The performance of pattern matching \"[[:ascii:]]\" and \"[[:^ascii:]]\" has been improved\nsignificantly except on EBCDIC platforms.\n\n• Various optimizations have been applied to matching regular expression patterns, so under\nthe right circumstances, significant performance gains may be noticed. But in an\napplication with many varied patterns, little overall improvement likely will be seen.\n\n• Other optimizations have been applied to UTF-8 handling, but these are not typically a\nmajor factor in most applications.\n" }, { "name": "Modules and Pragmata", "content": "Key highlights in this release across several modules:\n" }, { "name": "Removal of use vars", "content": "The usage of \"use vars\" has been discouraged since the introduction of \"our\" in Perl 5.6.0.\nWhere possible the usage of this pragma has now been removed from the Perl source code.\n\nThis had a slight effect (for the better) on the output of WARNINGBITS in B::Deparse.\n" }, { "name": "Use of DynaLoader changed to XSLoader in many modules", "content": "XSLoader is more modern, and most modules already require perl 5.6 or greater, so no\nfunctionality is lost by switching. In some cases, we have also made changes to the local\nimplementation that may not be reflected in the version on CPAN due to a desire to maintain\nmore backwards compatibility.\n" }, { "name": "Updated Modules and Pragmata", "content": "• Archive::Tar has been upgraded from version 2.24 to 2.30.\n\nThis update also handled CVE-2018-12015: directory traversal vulnerability. [cpan\n#125523] \n\n• arybase has been upgraded from version 0.12 to 0.15.\n\n• Attribute::Handlers has been upgraded from version 0.99 to 1.01.\n\n• attributes has been upgraded from version 0.29 to 0.33.\n\n• B has been upgraded from version 1.68 to 1.74.\n\n• B::Concise has been upgraded from version 0.999 to 1.003.\n\n• B::Debug has been upgraded from version 1.24 to 1.26.\n\nNOTE: B::Debug is deprecated and may be removed from a future version of Perl.\n\n• B::Deparse has been upgraded from version 1.40 to 1.48.\n\nIt includes many bug fixes, and in particular, it now deparses variable attributes\ncorrectly:\n\nmy $x :foo; # used to deparse as\n# 'attributes'->import('main', \\$x, 'foo'), my $x;\n\n• base has been upgraded from version 2.25 to 2.27.\n\n• bignum has been upgraded from version 0.47 to 0.49.\n\n• blib has been upgraded from version 1.06 to 1.07.\n\n• bytes has been upgraded from version 1.05 to 1.06.\n\n• Carp has been upgraded from version 1.42 to 1.50.\n\nIf a package on the call stack contains a constant named \"ISA\", Carp no longer throws a\n\"Not a GLOB reference\" error.\n\nCarp, when generating stack traces, now attempts to work around longstanding bugs\nresulting from Perl's non-reference-counted stack. [GH #9282]\n\n\nCarp has been modified to avoid assuming that objects cannot be overloaded without the\noverload module loaded (this can happen with objects created by XS modules). Previously,\ninfinite recursion would result if an XS-defined overload method itself called Carp. [GH\n#16407] \n\nCarp now avoids using \"overload::StrVal\", partly because older versions of overload\n(included with perl 5.14 and earlier) load Scalar::Util at run time, which will fail if\nCarp has been invoked after a syntax error.\n\n• charnames has been upgraded from version 1.44 to 1.45.\n\n• Compress::Raw::Zlib has been upgraded from version 2.074 to 2.076.\n\nThis addresses a security vulnerability in older versions of the 'zlib' library (which is\nbundled with Compress-Raw-Zlib).\n\n• Config::Extensions has been upgraded from version 0.01 to 0.02.\n\n• Config::Perl::V has been upgraded from version 0.28 to 0.29.\n\n• CPAN has been upgraded from version 2.18 to 2.20.\n\n• Data::Dumper has been upgraded from version 2.167 to 2.170.\n\nQuoting of glob names now obeys the Useqq option [GH #13274]\n.\n\nAttempts to set an option to \"undef\" through a combined getter/setter method are no\nlonger mistaken for getter calls [GH #12135]\n.\n\n• Devel::Peek has been upgraded from version 1.26 to 1.27.\n\n• Devel::PPPort has been upgraded from version 3.35 to 3.40.\n\nDevel::PPPort has moved from cpan-first to perl-first maintenance\n\nPrimary responsibility for the code in Devel::PPPort has moved into core perl. In a\npractical sense there should be no change except that hopefully it will stay more up to\ndate with changes made to symbols in perl, rather than needing to be updated after the\nfact.\n\n• Digest::SHA has been upgraded from version 5.96 to 6.01.\n\n• DirHandle has been upgraded from version 1.04 to 1.05.\n\n• DynaLoader has been upgraded from version 1.42 to 1.45.\n\nIts documentation now shows the use of \"PACKAGE\" and direct object syntax [GH #16190]\n.\n\n• Encode has been upgraded from version 2.88 to 2.97.\n\n• encoding has been upgraded from version 2.19 to 2.22.\n\n• Errno has been upgraded from version 1.28 to 1.29.\n\n• experimental has been upgraded from version 0.016 to 0.019.\n\n• Exporter has been upgraded from version 5.72 to 5.73.\n\n• ExtUtils::CBuilder has been upgraded from version 0.280225 to 0.280230.\n\n• ExtUtils::Constant has been upgraded from version 0.23 to 0.25.\n\n• ExtUtils::Embed has been upgraded from version 1.34 to 1.35.\n\n• ExtUtils::Install has been upgraded from version 2.04 to 2.14.\n\n• ExtUtils::MakeMaker has been upgraded from version 7.24 to 7.34.\n\n• ExtUtils::Miniperl has been upgraded from version 1.06 to 1.08.\n\n• ExtUtils::ParseXS has been upgraded from version 3.34 to 3.39.\n\n• ExtUtils::Typemaps has been upgraded from version 3.34 to 3.38.\n\n• ExtUtils::XSSymSet has been upgraded from version 1.3 to 1.4.\n\n• feature has been upgraded from version 1.47 to 1.52.\n\n• fields has been upgraded from version 2.23 to 2.24.\n\n• File::Copy has been upgraded from version 2.32 to 2.33.\n\nIt will now use the sub-second precision variant of utime() supplied by Time::HiRes where\navailable. [GH #16225] .\n\n• File::Fetch has been upgraded from version 0.52 to 0.56.\n\n• File::Glob has been upgraded from version 1.28 to 1.31.\n\n• File::Path has been upgraded from version 2.1201 to 2.15.\n\n• File::Spec and Cwd have been upgraded from version 3.67 to 3.74.\n\n• File::stat has been upgraded from version 1.07 to 1.08.\n\n• FileCache has been upgraded from version 1.09 to 1.10.\n\n• Filter::Simple has been upgraded from version 0.93 to 0.95.\n\n• Filter::Util::Call has been upgraded from version 1.55 to 1.58.\n\n• GDBMFile has been upgraded from version 1.15 to 1.17.\n\nIts documentation now explains that \"each\" and \"delete\" don't mix in hashes tied to this\nmodule [GH #12894] .\n\nIt will now retry opening with an acceptable block size if asking gdbm to default the\nblock size failed [GH #13232] .\n\n• Getopt::Long has been upgraded from version 2.49 to 2.5.\n\n• Hash::Util::FieldHash has been upgraded from version 1.19 to 1.20.\n\n• I18N::Langinfo has been upgraded from version 0.13 to 0.17.\n\nThis module is now available on all platforms, emulating the system nllanginfo(3) on\nsystems that lack it. Some caveats apply, as detailed in its documentation, the most\nsevere being that, except for MS Windows, the \"CODESET\" item is not implemented on those\nsystems, always returning \"\".\n\nIt now sets the UTF-8 flag in its returned scalar if the string contains legal non-ASCII\nUTF-8, and the locale is UTF-8 [GH #15131] .\n\nThis update also fixes a bug in which the underlying locale was ignored for the\n\"RADIXCHAR\" (always was returned as a dot) and the \"THOUSEP\" (always empty). Now the\nlocale-appropriate values are returned.\n\n• I18N::LangTags has been upgraded from version 0.42 to 0.43.\n\n• if has been upgraded from version 0.0606 to 0.0608.\n\n• IO has been upgraded from version 1.38 to 1.39.\n\n• IO::Socket::IP has been upgraded from version 0.38 to 0.39.\n\n• IPC::Cmd has been upgraded from version 0.96 to 1.00.\n\n• JSON::PP has been upgraded from version 2.2740002 to 2.97001.\n\n• The \"libnet\" distribution has been upgraded from version 3.10 to 3.11.\n\n• List::Util has been upgraded from version 1.4602 to 1.49.\n\n• Locale::Codes has been upgraded from version 3.42 to 3.56.\n\nNOTE: Locale::Codes scheduled to be removed from core in Perl 5.30.\n\n• Locale::Maketext has been upgraded from version 1.28 to 1.29.\n\n• Math::BigInt has been upgraded from version 1.999806 to 1.999811.\n\n• Math::BigInt::FastCalc has been upgraded from version 0.5005 to 0.5006.\n\n• Math::BigRat has been upgraded from version 0.2611 to 0.2613.\n\n• Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20170530 to 5.20180622.\n\n• mro has been upgraded from version 1.20 to 1.22.\n\n• Net::Ping has been upgraded from version 2.55 to 2.62.\n\n• NEXT has been upgraded from version 0.67 to 0.6701.\n\n• ODBMFile has been upgraded from version 1.14 to 1.15.\n\n• Opcode has been upgraded from version 1.39 to 1.43.\n\n• overload has been upgraded from version 1.28 to 1.30.\n\n• PerlIO::encoding has been upgraded from version 0.25 to 0.26.\n\n• PerlIO::scalar has been upgraded from version 0.26 to 0.29.\n\n• PerlIO::via has been upgraded from version 0.16 to 0.17.\n\n• Pod::Functions has been upgraded from version 1.11 to 1.13.\n\n• Pod::Html has been upgraded from version 1.2202 to 1.24.\n\nA title for the HTML document will now be automatically generated by default from a\n\"NAME\" section in the POD document, as it used to be before the module was rewritten to\nuse Pod::Simple::XHTML to do the core of its job [GH #11954]\n.\n\n• Pod::Perldoc has been upgraded from version 3.28 to 3.2801.\n\n• The \"podlators\" distribution has been upgraded from version 4.09 to 4.10.\n\nMan page references and function names now follow the Linux man page formatting\nstandards, instead of the Solaris standard.\n\n• POSIX has been upgraded from version 1.76 to 1.84.\n\nSome more cautions were added about using locale-specific functions in threaded\napplications.\n\n• re has been upgraded from version 0.34 to 0.36.\n\n• Scalar::Util has been upgraded from version 1.4602 to 1.50.\n\n• SelfLoader has been upgraded from version 1.23 to 1.25.\n\n• Socket has been upgraded from version 2.02003 to 2.027.\n\n• sort has been upgraded from version 2.02 to 2.04.\n\n• Storable has been upgraded from version 2.62 to 3.08.\n\n• Sub::Util has been upgraded from version 1.48 to 1.49.\n\n• subs has been upgraded from version 1.02 to 1.03.\n\n• Sys::Hostname has been upgraded from version 1.20 to 1.22.\n\n• Term::ReadLine has been upgraded from version 1.16 to 1.17.\n\n• Test has been upgraded from version 1.30 to 1.31.\n\n• Test::Harness has been upgraded from version 3.38 to 3.42.\n\n• Test::Simple has been upgraded from version 1.302073 to 1.302133.\n\n• threads has been upgraded from version 2.15 to 2.22.\n\nThe documentation now better describes the problems that arise when returning values from\nthreads, and no longer warns about creating threads in \"BEGIN\" blocks. [GH #11563]\n\n\n• threads::shared has been upgraded from version 1.56 to 1.58.\n\n• Tie::Array has been upgraded from version 1.06 to 1.07.\n\n• Tie::StdHandle has been upgraded from version 4.4 to 4.5.\n\n• Time::gmtime has been upgraded from version 1.03 to 1.04.\n\n• Time::HiRes has been upgraded from version 1.9741 to 1.9759.\n\n• Time::localtime has been upgraded from version 1.02 to 1.03.\n\n• Time::Piece has been upgraded from version 1.31 to 1.3204.\n\n• Unicode::Collate has been upgraded from version 1.19 to 1.25.\n\n• Unicode::Normalize has been upgraded from version 1.25 to 1.26.\n\n• Unicode::UCD has been upgraded from version 0.68 to 0.70.\n\nThe function \"num\" now accepts an optional parameter to help in diagnosing error returns.\n\n• User::grent has been upgraded from version 1.01 to 1.02.\n\n• User::pwent has been upgraded from version 1.00 to 1.01.\n\n• utf8 has been upgraded from version 1.19 to 1.21.\n\n• vars has been upgraded from version 1.03 to 1.04.\n\n• version has been upgraded from version 0.9917 to 0.9923.\n\n• VMS::DCLsym has been upgraded from version 1.08 to 1.09.\n\n• VMS::Stdio has been upgraded from version 2.41 to 2.44.\n\n• warnings has been upgraded from version 1.37 to 1.42.\n\nIt now includes new functions with names ending in \"atlevel\", allowing callers to\nspecify the exact call frame. [GH #16257] \n\n• XS::Typemap has been upgraded from version 0.15 to 0.16.\n\n• XSLoader has been upgraded from version 0.27 to 0.30.\n\nIts documentation now shows the use of \"PACKAGE\", and direct object syntax for\nexample \"DynaLoader\" usage [GH #16190] .\n\nPlatforms that use \"mod2fname\" to edit the names of loadable libraries now look for\nbootstrap (.bs) files under the correct, non-edited name.\n" }, { "name": "Removed Modules and Pragmata", "content": "• The \"VMS::stdio\" compatibility shim has been removed.\n" } ] }, "Documentation": { "content": "", "subsections": [ { "name": "Changes to Existing Documentation", "content": "We have attempted to update the documentation to reflect the changes listed in this document.\nIf you find any we have missed, send email to perlbug@perl.org .\n\nAdditionally, the following selected changes have been made:\n\nperlapi\n\n• The API functions \"perlparse()\", \"perlrun()\", and \"perldestruct()\" are now documented\ncomprehensively, where previously the only documentation was a reference to the perlembed\ntutorial.\n\n• The documentation of \"newGIVENOP()\" has been belatedly updated to account for the removal\nof lexical $.\n\n• The API functions \"newCONSTSUB()\" and \"newCONSTSUBflags()\" are documented much more\ncomprehensively than before.\n\nperldata\n\n• The section \"Truth and Falsehood\" in perlsyn has been moved into perldata.\n\nperldebguts\n\n• The description of the conditions under which \"DB::sub()\" will be called has been\nclarified. [GH #16055] \n\nperldiag\n\n• \"Variable length lookbehind not implemented in regex m/%s/\" in perldiag\n\nThis now gives more ideas as to workarounds to the issue that was introduced in Perl 5.18\n(but not documented explicitly in its perldelta) for the fact that some Unicode \"/i\"\nrules cause a few sequences such as\n\n(?\n\n• The documentation for the \"exists\" operator no longer says that autovivification\nbehaviour \"may be fixed in a future release\". We've determined that we're not going to\nchange the default behaviour. [GH #15231] \n\n• A couple of small details in the documentation for the \"bless\" operator have been\nclarified. [GH #14684] \n\n• The description of @INC hooks in the documentation for \"require\" has been corrected to\nsay that filter subroutines receive a useless first argument. [GH #12569]\n\n\n• The documentation of \"ref\" has been rewritten for clarity.\n\n• The documentation of \"use\" now explains what syntactically qualifies as a version number\nfor its module version checking feature.\n\n• The documentation of \"warn\" has been updated to reflect that since Perl 5.14 it has\ntreated complex exception objects in a manner equivalent to \"die\". [GH #13641]\n\n\n• The documentation of \"die\" and \"warn\" has been revised for clarity.\n\n• The documentation of \"each\" has been improved, with a slightly more explicit description\nof the sharing of iterator state, and with caveats regarding the fragility of while-each\nloops. [GH #16334] \n\n• Clarification to \"require\" was added to explain the differences between\n\nrequire Foo::Bar;\nrequire \"Foo/Bar.pm\";\n\nperlgit\n\n• The precise rules for identifying \"smoke-me\" branches are now stated.\n\nperlguts\n\n• The section on reference counting in perlguts has been heavily revised, to describe\nreferences in the way a programmer needs to think about them rather than in terms of the\nphysical data structures.\n\n• Improve documentation related to UTF-8 multibytes.\n\nperlintern\n\n• The internal functions \"newXSlenflags()\" and \"newATTRSUBx()\" are now documented.\n\nperlobj\n\n• The documentation about \"DESTROY\" methods has been corrected, updated, and revised,\nespecially in regard to how they interact with exceptions. [GH #14083]\n\n\nperlop\n\n• The description of the \"x\" operator in perlop has been clarified. [GH #16253]\n\n\n• perlop has been updated to note that \"qw\"'s whitespace rules differ from that of\n\"split\"'s in that only ASCII whitespace is used.\n\n• The general explanation of operator precedence and associativity has been corrected and\nclarified. [GH #15153] \n\n• The documentation for the \"\\\" referencing operator now explains the unusual context that\nit supplies to its operand. [GH #15932] \n\nperlrequick\n\n• Clarifications on metacharacters and character classes\n\nperlretut\n\n• Clarify metacharacters.\n\nperlrun\n\n• Clarify the differences between -M and -m. [GH #15998]\n\n\nperlsec\n\n• The documentation about set-id scripts has been updated and revised. [GH #10289]\n\n\n• A section about using \"sudo\" to run Perl scripts has been added.\n\nperlsyn\n\n• The section \"Truth and Falsehood\" in perlsyn has been removed from that document, where\nit didn't belong, and merged into the existing paragraph on the same topic in perldata.\n\n• The means to disambiguate between code blocks and hash constructors, already documented\nin perlref, are now documented in perlsyn too. [GH #15918]\n\n\nperluniprops\n\n• perluniprops has been updated to note that \"\\p{Word}\" now includes code points matching\nthe \"\\p{JoinControl}\" property. The change to the property was made in Perl 5.18, but\nnot documented until now. There are currently only two code points that match this\nproperty U+200C (ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER) and U+200D (ZERO WIDTH JOINER).\n\n• For each binary table or property, the documentation now includes which characters in the\nrange \"\\x00-\\xFF\" it matches, as well as a list of the first few ranges of code points\nmatched above that.\n\nperlvar\n\n• The entry for $+ in perlvar has been expanded upon to describe handling of multiply-named\ncapturing groups.\n\nperlfunc, perlop, perlsyn\n\n• In various places, improve the documentation of the special cases in the condition\nexpression of a while loop, such as implicit \"defined\" and assignment to $. [GH #16334]\n\n" } ] }, "Diagnostics": { "content": "The following additions or changes have been made to diagnostic output, including warnings\nand fatal error messages. For the complete list of diagnostic messages, see perldiag.\n", "subsections": [ { "name": "New Diagnostics", "content": "New Errors\n\n• Can't \"goto\" into a \"given\" block\n\n(F) A \"goto\" statement was executed to jump into the middle of a \"given\" block. You\ncan't get there from here. See \"goto\" in perlfunc.\n\n• Can't \"goto\" into a binary or list expression\n\nUse of \"goto\" to jump into the parameter of a binary or list operator has been\nprohibited, to prevent crashes and stack corruption. [GH #15914]\n\n\nYou may only enter the first argument of an operator that takes a fixed number of\narguments, since this is a case that will not cause stack corruption. [GH #16415]\n\n\nNew Warnings\n\n• Old package separator used in string\n\n(W syntax) You used the old package separator, \"'\", in a variable named inside a double-\nquoted string; e.g., \"In $name's house\". This is equivalent to \"In $name::s house\". If\nyou meant the former, put a backslash before the apostrophe (\"In $name\\'s house\").\n\n• \"Locale '%s' contains (at least) the following characters which have unexpected meanings:\n%s The Perl program will use the expected meanings\" in perldiag\n" }, { "name": "Changes to Existing Diagnostics", "content": "• A false-positive warning that was issued when using a numerically-quantified sub-pattern\nin a recursive regex has been silenced. [GH #16106]\n\n\n• The warning about useless use of a concatenation operator in void context is now\ngenerated for expressions with multiple concatenations, such as \"$a.$b.$c\", which used to\nmistakenly not warn. [GH #3990] \n\n• Warnings that a variable or subroutine \"masks earlier declaration in same ...\", or that\nan \"our\" variable has been redeclared, have been moved to a new warnings category\n\"shadow\". Previously they were in category \"misc\".\n\n• The deprecation warning from \"Sys::Hostname::hostname()\" saying that it doesn't accept\narguments now states the Perl version in which the warning will be upgraded to an error.\n[GH #14662] \n\n• The perldiag entry for the error regarding a set-id script has been expanded to make\nclear that the error is reporting a specific security vulnerability, and to advise how to\nfix it.\n\n• The \"Unable to flush stdout\" error message was missing a trailing newline. [debian\n#875361]\n" }, { "name": "Utility Changes", "content": "" }, { "name": "perlbug", "content": "• \"--help\" and \"--version\" options have been added.\n" }, { "name": "Configuration and Compilation", "content": "• C89 requirement\n\nPerl has been documented as requiring a C89 compiler to build since October 1998. A\nvariety of simplifications have now been made to Perl's internals to rely on the features\nspecified by the C89 standard. We believe that this internal change hasn't altered the\nset of platforms that Perl builds on, but please report a bug if Perl now has new\nproblems building on your platform.\n\n• On GCC, \"-Werror=pointer-arith\" is now enabled by default, disallowing arithmetic on void\nand function pointers.\n\n• Where an HTML version of the documentation is installed, the HTML documents now use\nrelative links to refer to each other. Links from the index page of perlipc to the\nindividual section documents are now correct. [GH #11941]\n\n\n• lib/unicore/mktables now correctly canonicalizes the names of the dependencies stored in\nthe files it generates.\n\nregen/mkinvlists.pl, unlike the other regen/*.pl scripts, used $0 to name itself in the\ndependencies stored in the files it generates. It now uses a literal so that the path\nstored in the generated files doesn't depend on how regen/mkinvlists.pl is invoked.\n\nThis lack of canonical names could cause test failures in t/porting/regen.t. [GH #16446]\n\n\n• New probes\n\nHASBUILTINADDOVERFLOW\nHASBUILTINMULOVERFLOW\nHASBUILTINSUBOVERFLOW\nHASTHREADSAFENLLANGINFOL\nHASLOCALECONVL\nHASMBRLEN\nHASMBRTOWC\nHASMEMRCHR\nHASNANOSLEEP\nHASSTRNLEN\nHASSTRTOLDL\nIWCHAR\n" } ] }, "Testing": { "content": "• Testing of the XS-APItest directory is now done in parallel, where applicable.\n\n• Perl now includes a default .travis.yml file for Travis CI testing on github mirrors.\n[GH #14558] \n\n• The watchdog timer count in re/patpsycho.t can now be overridden.\n\nThis test can take a long time to run, so there is a timer to keep this in check\n(currently, 5 minutes). This commit adds checking the environment variable\n\"PERLTESTTIMEOUTFACTOR\"; if set, the time out setting is multiplied by its value.\n\n• harness no longer waits for 30 seconds when running t/io/openpid.t. [GH #13535]\n [GH #16420]\n\n", "subsections": [] }, "Packaging": { "content": "For the past few years we have released perl using three different archive formats: bzip\n(\".bz2\"), LZMA2 (\".xz\") and gzip (\".gz\"). Since xz compresses better and decompresses faster,\nand gzip is more compatible and uses less memory, we have dropped the \".bz2\" archive format\nwith this release. (If this poses a problem, do let us know; see \"Reporting Bugs\", below.)\n", "subsections": [ { "name": "Platform Support", "content": "" }, { "name": "Discontinued Platforms", "content": "PowerUX / Power MAX OS\nCompiler hints and other support for these apparently long-defunct platforms has been\nremoved.\n" }, { "name": "Platform-Specific Notes", "content": "CentOS\nCompilation on CentOS 5 is now fixed.\n\nCygwin\nA build with the quadmath library can now be done on Cygwin.\n\nDarwin\nPerl now correctly uses reentrant functions, like \"asctimer\", on versions of Darwin that\nhave support for them.\n\nFreeBSD\nFreeBSD's /usr/share/mk/sys.mk specifies \"-O2\" for architectures other than ARM and MIPS.\nBy default, perl is now compiled with the same optimization levels.\n\nVMS Several fix-ups for configure.com, marking function VMS has (or doesn't have).\n\nCRTL features can now be set by embedders before invoking Perl by using the\n\"decc$featureset\" and \"decc$featuresetvalue\" functions. Previously any attempt to set\nfeatures after image initialization were ignored.\n\nWindows\n• Support for compiling perl on Windows using Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 (containing\nVisual C++ 14.1) has been added.\n\n• Visual C++ compiler version detection has been improved to work on non-English\nlanguage systems.\n\n• We now set $Config{libpth} correctly for 64-bit builds using Visual C++ versions\nearlier than 14.1.\n" }, { "name": "Internal Changes", "content": "• A new optimisation phase has been added to the compiler, \"optimizeoptree()\", which does\na top-down scan of a complete optree just before the peephole optimiser is run. This\nphase is not currently hookable.\n\n• An \"OPMULTICONCAT\" op has been added. At \"optimizeoptree()\" time, a chain of\n\"OPCONCAT\" and \"OPCONST\" ops, together optionally with an \"OPSTRINGIFY\" and/or\n\"OPSASSIGN\", are combined into a single \"OPMULTICONCAT\" op. The op is of type\n\"UNOPAUX\", and the aux array contains the argument count, plus a pointer to a constant\nstring and a set of segment lengths. For example with\n\nmy $x = \"foo=$foo, bar=$bar\\n\";\n\nthe constant string would be \"foo=, bar=\\n\" and the segment lengths would be (4,6,1). If\nthe string contains characters such as \"\\x80\", whose representation changes under utf8,\ntwo sets of strings plus lengths are precomputed and stored.\n\n• Direct access to \"PLkeywordplugin\" is not safe in the presence of multithreading. A new\n\"wrapkeywordplugin\" function has been added to allow XS modules to safely define custom\nkeywords even when loaded from a thread, analogous to \"PLcheck\" / \"wrapopchecker\".\n\n• The \"PLstatbuf\" interpreter variable has been removed.\n\n• The deprecated function \"toutf8case()\", accessible from XS code, has been removed.\n\n• A new function \"isutf8invariantstringloc()\" has been added that is like\n\"isutf8invariantstring()\" but takes an extra pointer parameter into which is stored\nthe location of the first variant character, if any are found.\n\n• A new function, \"Perllanginfo()\" has been added. It is an (almost) drop-in replacement\nfor the system nllanginfo(3), but works on platforms that lack that; as well as being\nmore thread-safe, and hiding some gotchas with locale handling from the caller. Code\nthat uses this, needn't use localeconv(3) (and be affected by the gotchas) to find the\ndecimal point, thousands separator, or currency symbol. See \"Perllanginfo\" in perlapi.\n\n• A new API function \"svrvunweaken()\" has been added to complement \"svrvweaken()\". The\nimplementation was taken from \"unweaken\" in Scalar::Util.\n\n• A new flag, \"SORTfUNSTABLE\", has been added. This will allow a future commit to make\nmergesort unstable when the user specifies ‘no sort stable’, since it has been decided\nthat mergesort should remain stable by default.\n\n• XS modules can now automatically get reentrant versions of system functions on threaded\nperls.\n\nBy adding\n\n#define PERLREENTRANT\n\nnear the beginning of an \"XS\" file, it will be compiled so that whatever reentrant\nfunctions perl knows about on that system will automatically and invisibly be used\ninstead of the plain, non-reentrant versions. For example, if you write \"getpwnam()\" in\nyour code, on a system that has \"getpwnamr()\" all calls to the former will be translated\ninvisibly into the latter. This does not happen except on threaded perls, as they aren't\nneeded otherwise. Be aware that which functions have reentrant versions varies from\nsystem to system.\n\n• The \"PERLNOOPPARENT\" build define is no longer supported, which means that perl is now\nalways built with \"PERLOPPARENT\" enabled.\n\n• The format and content of the non-utf8 transliteration table attached to the \"oppv\"\nfield of \"OPTRANS\"/\"OPTRANSR\" ops has changed. It's now a \"struct OPtransmap\".\n\n• A new compiler \"#define\", \"dTHXDEBUGGING\". has been added. This is useful for XS or C\ncode that only need the thread context because their debugging statements that get\ncompiled only under \"-DDEBUGGING\" need one.\n\n• A new API function \"Perlsetlocale\" in perlapi has been added.\n\n• \"synclocale\" in perlapi has been revised to return a boolean as to whether the system\nwas using the global locale or not.\n\n• A new kind of magic scalar, called a \"nonelem\" scalar, has been introduced. It is stored\nin an array to denote a non-existent element, whenever such an element is accessed in a\npotential lvalue context. It replaces the existing \"defelem\" (deferred element) magic\nwherever this is possible, being significantly more efficient. This means that\n\"somesub($sparsearray[$nonelem])\" no longer has to create a new magic defelem scalar\neach time, as long as the element is within the array.\n\nIt partially fixes the rare bug of deferred elements getting out of synch with their\narrays when the array is shifted or unshifted. [GH #16364]\n\n" }, { "name": "Selected Bug Fixes", "content": "• List assignment (\"aassign\") could in some rare cases allocate an entry on the mortals\nstack and leave the entry uninitialized, leading to possible crashes. [GH #16017]\n\n\n• Attempting to apply an attribute to an \"our\" variable where a function of that name\nalready exists could result in a NULL pointer being supplied where an SV was expected,\ncrashing perl. [perl #131597] \n\n• \"split ' '\" now correctly handles the argument being split when in the scope of the\n\"unicodestrings\" feature. Previously, when a string using the single-byte internal\nrepresentation contained characters that are whitespace by Unicode rules but not by ASCII\nrules, it treated those characters as part of fields rather than as field separators.\n[GH #15904] \n\n• Several built-in functions previously had bugs that could cause them to write to the\ninternal stack without allocating room for the item being written. In rare situations,\nthis could have led to a crash. These bugs have now been fixed, and if any similar bugs\nare introduced in future, they will be detected automatically in debugging builds.\n\nThese internal stack usage checks introduced are also done by the \"entersub\" operator\nwhen calling XSUBs. This means we can report which XSUB failed to allocate enough stack\nspace. [GH #16126] \n\n• Using a symbolic ref with postderef syntax as the key in a hash lookup was yielding an\nassertion failure on debugging builds. [GH #16029]\n\n\n• Array and hash variables whose names begin with a caret now admit indexing inside their\ncurlies when interpolated into strings, as in \"${^CAPTURE[0]}\" to index \"@{^CAPTURE}\".\n[GH #16050] \n\n• Fetching the name of a glob that was previously UTF-8 but wasn't any longer would return\nthat name flagged as UTF-8. [GH #15971] \n\n• The perl \"sprintf()\" function (via the underlying C function \"Perlsvvcatpvfnflags()\")\nhas been heavily reworked to fix many minor bugs, including the integer wrapping of large\nwidth and precision specifiers and potential buffer overruns. It has also been made\nfaster in many cases.\n\n• Exiting from an \"eval\", whether normally or via an exception, now always frees temporary\nvalues (possibly calling destructors) before setting $@. For example:\n\nsub DESTROY { eval { die \"died in DESTROY\"; } }\neval { bless []; };\n# $@ used to be equal to \"died in DESTROY\" here; it's now \"\".\n\n• Fixed a duplicate symbol failure with \"-flto -mieee-fp\" builds. pp.c defined\n\"LIBVERSION\" which \"-lieee\" already defines. [GH #16086]\n\n\n• The tokenizer no longer consumes the exponent part of a floating point number if it's\nincomplete. [GH #16073] \n\n• On non-threaded builds, for \"m/$null/\" where $null is an empty string is no longer\ntreated as if the \"/o\" flag was present when the previous matching match operator\nincluded the \"/o\" flag. The rewriting used to implement this behavior could confuse the\ninterpreter. This matches the behaviour of threaded builds. [GH #14668]\n\n\n• Parsing a \"sub\" definition could cause a use after free if the \"sub\" keyword was followed\nby whitespace including newlines (and comments.) [GH #16097]\n\n\n• The tokenizer now correctly adjusts a parse pointer when skipping whitespace in a\n\"${identifier}\" construct. [perl #131949]\n\n\n• Accesses to \"${^LASTFH}\" no longer assert after using any of a variety of I/O operations\non a non-glob. [GH #15372] \n\n• The XS-level \"Copy()\", \"Move()\", \"Zero()\" macros and their variants now assert if the\npointers supplied are \"NULL\". ISO C considers supplying NULL pointers to the functions\nthese macros are built upon as undefined behaviour even when their count parameters are\nzero. Based on these assertions and the original bug report three macro calls were made\nconditional. [GH #16079] [GH #16112]\n\n\n• Only the \"=\" operator is permitted for defining defaults for parameters in subroutine\nsignatures. Previously other assignment operators, e.g. \"+=\", were also accidentally\npermitted. [GH #16084] \n\n• Package names are now always included in \":prototype\" warnings [perl #131833]\n\n\n• The \"jeoldstackhwm\" field, previously only found in the \"jmpenv\" structure on\ndebugging builds, has been added to non-debug builds as well. This fixes an issue with\nsome CPAN modules caused by the size of this structure varying between debugging and non-\ndebugging builds. [GH #16122] \n\n• The arguments to the \"ninstr()\" macro are now correctly parenthesized.\n\n• A NULL pointer dereference in the \"Sregmatch()\" function has been fixed. [perl #132017]\n\n\n• Calling exec PROGRAM LIST with an empty \"LIST\" has been fixed. This should call\n\"execvp()\" with an empty \"argv\" array (containing only the terminating \"NULL\" pointer),\nbut was instead just returning false (and not setting $!). [GH #16075]\n\n\n• The \"gvfetchmethsv\" C function stopped working properly in Perl 5.22 when fetching a\nconstant with a UTF-8 name if that constant subroutine was stored in the stash as a\nsimple scalar reference, rather than a full typeglob. This has been corrected.\n\n• Single-letter debugger commands followed by an argument which starts with punctuation\n(e.g. \"p$^V\" and \"x@ARGV\") now work again. They had been wrongly requiring a space\nbetween the command and the argument. [GH #13342]\n\n\n• splice now throws an exception (\"Modification of a read-only value attempted\") when\nmodifying a read-only array. Until now it had been silently modifying the array. The\nnew behaviour is consistent with the behaviour of push and unshift. [GH #15923]\n\n\n• \"stat()\", \"lstat()\", and file test operators now fail if given a filename containing a\nnul character, in the same way that \"open()\" already fails.\n\n• \"stat()\", \"lstat()\", and file test operators now reliably set $! when failing due to\nbeing applied to a closed or otherwise invalid file handle.\n\n• File test operators for Unix permission bits that don't exist on a particular platform,\nsuch as \"-k\" (sticky bit) on Windows, now check that the file being tested exists before\nreturning the blanket false result, and yield the appropriate errors if the argument\ndoesn't refer to a file.\n\n• Fixed a 'read before buffer' overrun when parsing a range starting with \"\\N{}\" at the\nbeginning of the character set for the transliteration operator. [GH #16189]\n\n\n• Fixed a leaked scalar when parsing an empty \"\\N{}\" at compile-time. [GH #16189]\n\n\n• Calling \"do $path\" on a directory or block device now yields a meaningful error code in\n$!. [GH #14841] \n\n• Regexp substitution using an overloaded replacement value that provides a tainted\nstringification now correctly taints the resulting string. [GH #12495]\n\n\n• Lexical sub declarations in \"do\" blocks such as \"do { my sub lex; 123 }\" could corrupt\nthe stack, erasing items already on the stack in the enclosing statement. This has been\nfixed. [GH #16243] \n\n• \"pack\" and \"unpack\" can now handle repeat counts and lengths that exceed two billion.\n[GH #13179] \n\n• Digits past the radix point in octal and binary floating point literals now have the\ncorrect weight on platforms where a floating point significand doesn't fit into an\ninteger type.\n\n• The canonical truth value no longer has a spurious special meaning as a callable\nsubroutine. It used to be a magic placeholder for a missing \"import\" or \"unimport\"\nmethod, but is now treated like any other string 1. [GH #14902]\n\n\n• \"system\" now reduces its arguments to strings in the parent process, so any effects of\nstringifying them (such as overload methods being called or warnings being emitted) are\nvisible in the way the program expects. [GH #13561]\n\n\n• The \"readpipe()\" built-in function now checks at compile time that it has only one\nparameter expression, and puts it in scalar context, thus ensuring that it doesn't\ncorrupt the stack at runtime. [GH #2793] \n\n• \"sort\" now performs correct reference counting when aliasing $a and $b, thus avoiding\npremature destruction and leakage of scalars if they are re-aliased during execution of\nthe sort comparator. [GH #11422] \n\n• \"reverse\" with no operand, reversing $ by default, is no longer in danger of corrupting\nthe stack. [GH #16291] \n\n• \"exec\", \"system\", et al are no longer liable to have their argument lists corrupted by\nreentrant calls and by magic such as tied scalars. [GH #15660]\n\n\n• Perl's own \"malloc\" no longer gets confused by attempts to allocate more than a gigabyte\non a 64-bit platform. [GH #13273] \n\n• Stacked file test operators in a sort comparator expression no longer cause a crash. [GH\n#15626] \n\n• An identity \"tr///\" transformation on a reference is no longer mistaken for that\nreference for the purposes of deciding whether it can be assigned to. [GH #15812]\n\n\n• Lengthy hexadecimal, octal, or binary floating point literals no longer cause undefined\nbehaviour when parsing digits that are of such low significance that they can't affect\nthe floating point value. [GH #16114] \n\n• \"open $$scalarref...\" and similar invocations no longer leak the file handle. [GH\n#12593] \n\n• Some convoluted kinds of regexp no longer cause an arithmetic overflow when compiled.\n[GH #16113] \n\n• The default typemap, by avoiding \"newGVgen\", now no longer leaks when XSUBs return file\nhandles (\"PerlIO *\" or \"FILE *\"). [GH #12593]\n\n\n• Creating a \"BEGIN\" block as an XS subroutine with a prototype no longer crashes because\nof the early freeing of the subroutine.\n\n• The \"printf\" format specifier \"%.0f\" no longer rounds incorrectly [GH #9125]\n, and now shows the correct sign for a\nnegative zero.\n\n• Fixed an issue where the error \"Scalar value @arrayname[0] better written as $arrayname\"\nwould give an error \"Cannot printf Inf with 'c'\" when arrayname starts with \"Inf\". [GH\n#16335] \n\n• The Perl implementation of \"getcwd()\" in \"Cwd\" in the PathTools distribution now behaves\nthe same as XS implementation on errors: it returns an error, and sets $!. [GH #16338]\n\n\n• Vivify array elements when putting them on the stack. Fixes [GH #5310]\n (reported in April 2002).\n\n• Fixed parsing of braced subscript after parens. Fixes [GH #4688]\n (reported in December 2001).\n\n• \"tr/nonutf8/longnonutf8/c\" could give the wrong results when the length of the\nreplacement character list was greater than 0x7fff.\n\n• \"tr/nonutf8/nonutf8/cd\" failed to add the implied \"\\x{100}-\\x{7fffffff}\" to the search\ncharacter list.\n\n• Compilation failures within \"perl-within-perl\" constructs, such as with string\ninterpolation and the right part of \"s///e\", now cause compilation to abort earlier.\n\nPreviously compilation could continue in order to report other errors, but the failed\nsub-parse could leave partly parsed constructs on the parser shift-reduce stack,\nconfusing the parser, leading to perl crashes. [GH #14739]\n\n\n• On threaded perls where the decimal point (radix) character is not a dot, it has been\npossible for a race to occur between threads when one needs to use the real radix\ncharacter (such as with \"sprintf\"). This has now been fixed by use of a mutex on systems\nwithout thread-safe locales, and the problem just doesn't come up on those with thread-\nsafe locales.\n\n• Errors while compiling a regex character class could sometime trigger an assertion\nfailure. [GH #16172] \n" } ] }, "Acknowledgements": { "content": "Perl 5.28.0 represents approximately 13 months of development since Perl 5.26.0 and contains\napproximately 730,000 lines of changes across 2,200 files from 77 authors.\n\nExcluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately\n580,000 lines of changes to 1,300 .pm, .t, .c and .h files.\n\nPerl continues to flourish into its fourth decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and\ndevelopers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became\nPerl 5.28.0:\n\nAaron Crane, Abigail, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Alberto Simões, Alexandr Savca, Andrew Fresh,\nAndy Dougherty, Andy Lester, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Ask Bjørn Hansen, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams,\nCraig A. Berry, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, Dan Collins, Daniel Dragan, David Cantrell, David\nMitchell, Dmitry Ulanov, Dominic Hargreaves, E. Choroba, Eric Herman, Eugen Konkov, Father\nChrysostomos, Gene Sullivan, George Hartzell, Graham Knop, Harald Jörg, H.Merijn Brand, Hugo\nvan der Sanden, Jacques Germishuys, James E Keenan, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Jerry D. Hedden, J.\nNick Koston, John Lightsey, John Peacock, John P. Linderman, John SJ Anderson, Karen\nEtheridge, Karl Williamson, Ken Brown, Ken Cotterill, Leon Timmermans, Lukas Mai, Marco\nFontani, Marc-Philip Werner, Matthew Horsfall, Neil Bowers, Nicholas Clark, Nicolas R., Niko\nTyni, Pali, Paul Marquess, Peter John Acklam, Reini Urban, Renee Baecker, Ricardo Signes,\nRobin Barker, Sawyer X, Scott Lanning, Sergey Aleynikov, Shirakata Kentaro, Shoichi Kaji,\nSlaven Rezic, Smylers, Steffen Müller, Steve Hay, Sullivan Beck, Thomas Sibley, Todd Rinaldo,\nTomasz Konojacki, Tom Hukins, Tom Wyant, Tony Cook, Vitali Peil, Yves Orton, Zefram.\n\nThe list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically generated from version\ncontrol history. In particular, it does not include the names of the (very much appreciated)\ncontributors who reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.\n\nMany of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in\nPerl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish.\n\nFor a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors, please see the AUTHORS\nfile in the Perl source distribution.\n", "subsections": [ { "name": "Reporting Bugs", "content": "If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the perl bug database at\n . There may also be information at , the Perl\nHome Page.\n\nIf you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug program included with your\nrelease. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report,\nalong with the output of \"perl -V\", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by\nthe Perl porting team.\n\nIf the bug you are reporting has security implications which make it inappropriate to send to\na publicly archived mailing list, then see \"SECURITY VULNERABILITY CONTACT INFORMATION\" in\nperlsec for details of how to report the issue.\n" }, { "name": "Give Thanks", "content": "If you wish to thank the Perl 5 Porters for the work we had done in Perl 5, you can do so by\nrunning the \"perlthanks\" program:\n\nperlthanks\n\nThis will send an email to the Perl 5 Porters list with your show of thanks.\n" } ] }, "SEE ALSO": { "content": "The Changes file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details on what changed.\n\nThe INSTALL file for how to build Perl.\n\nThe README file for general stuff.\n\nThe Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.\n\n\n\nperl v5.34.0 2025-07-25 PERL5280DELTA(1)", "subsections": [] } }, "summary": "perl5280delta - what is new for perl v5.28.0", "flags": [], "examples": [], "see_also": [] }