perl589delta - what is new for perl v5.8.9
This document describes differences between the 5.8.8 release and the 5.8.9 release.
The 5.8.9 release will be the last significant release of the 5.8.x series. Any future releases of 5.8.x will likely only be to deal with security issues, and platform build failures. Hence you should look to migrating to 5.10.x, if you have not started already. See Known Problems for more information.
A particular construction in the source code of extensions written in C++ may need changing. See Changed Internals for more details. All extensions written in C, most written in C++, and all existing compiled extensions are unaffected. This was necessary to improve C++ support.
Other than this, there are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.8.8. If any exist, they are bugs and reports are welcome.
The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.8 has been updated to 5.1.0 from 4.1.0. See http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.1.0/#NotableChanges for the notable changes.
It is now possible to call stat and the -X filestat operators on
directory handles. As both directory and file handles are barewords, there
can be ambiguities over which was intended. In these situations the file
handle semantics are preferred. Both also treat *FILE{IO}
filehandles
like *FILE
filehandles.
It's possible to enhance the mechanism of subroutine hooks in @INC by adding a source filter on top of the filehandle opened and returned by the hook. This feature was planned a long time ago, but wasn't quite working until now. See require for details. (Nicholas Clark)
The constant folding routine is now wrapped in an exception handler, and if folding throws an exception (such as attempting to evaluate 0/0), perl now retains the current optree, rather than aborting the whole program. Without this change, programs would not compile if they had expressions that happened to generate exceptions, even though those expressions were in code that could never be reached at runtime. (Nicholas Clark, Dave Mitchell)
no VERSION
You can now use no followed by a version number to specify that you
want to use a version of perl older than the specified one.
The code that caches calculated UTF-8 byte offsets for character offsets for a string has been re-written. Several bugs have been located and eliminated, and the code now makes better use of the information it has, so should be faster. In particular, it doesn't scan to the end of a string before calculating an offset within the string, which should speed up some operations on long strings. It is now possible to disable the caching code at run time, to verify that it is not the cause of suspected problems.
There is now Configure support for creating a perl tree that is relocatable at run time. see Relocatable installations.
${^CHILD_ERROR_NATIVE}
This variable gives the native status returned by the last pipe close,
backtick command, successful call to wait or waitpid, or from the
system operator. See perlvar for details. (Contributed by Gisle Aas.)
${^UTF8CACHE}
This variable controls the state of the internal UTF-8 offset caching code. 1 for on (the default), 0 for off, -1 to debug the caching code by checking all its results against linear scans, and panicking on any discrepancy.
readpipe is now overridableThe built-in function readpipe is now overridable. Overriding it permits
also to override its operator counterpart, qx// (also known as ``
).
Perl 5.8.9 (and 5.10.0 onwards) now provides a couple of macros to do very
basic exception handling in XS modules. You can use these macros if you call
code that may croak
, but you need to do some cleanup before giving control
back to Perl. See Exception Handling in perlguts for more details.
-Dq
suppresses the EXECUTING... message when running under -D
-Dl
logs runops loop entry and exit, and jump level popping.
-Dv
displays the process id as part of the trace output.
Some pure-perl code that the regexp engine was using to retrieve Unicode properties and transliteration mappings has been reimplemented in XS for faster execution. (SADAHIRO Tomoyuki)
The interpreter internals now support a far more memory efficient form of inlineable constants. Storing a reference to a constant value in a symbol table is equivalent to a full typeglob referencing a constant subroutine, but using about 400 bytes less memory. This proxy constant subroutine is automatically upgraded to a real typeglob with subroutine if necessary. The approach taken is analogous to the existing space optimisation for subroutine stub declarations, which are stored as plain scalars in place of the full typeglob.
However, to aid backwards compatibility of existing code, which (wrongly) does not expect anything other than typeglobs in symbol tables, nothing in core uses this feature, other than the regression tests.
Stubs for prototyped subroutines have been stored in symbol tables as plain strings, and stubs for unprototyped subroutines as the number -1, since 5.005, so code which assumes that the core only places typeglobs in symbol tables has been making incorrect assumptions for over 10 years.
Compile support added for:
DragonFlyBSD
MidnightBSD
MirOS BSD
RISC OS
Cray XT4/Catamount
Module::Pluggable
is a simple framework to create modules that accept
pluggable sub-modules. The bundled version is 3.8
Module::CoreList
is a hash of hashes that is keyed on perl version as
indicated in $]
. The bundled version is 2.17
Win32API::File
now available in core on Microsoft Windows. The bundled
version is 0.1001_01
Devel::InnerPackage
finds all the packages defined by a single file. It is
part of the Module::Pluggable
distribution. The bundled version is 0.3
attributes
upgraded to version 0.09
AutoLoader
upgraded to version 5.67
AutoSplit
upgraded to 1.06
autouse
upgraded to version 1.06
B
upgraded from 1.09_01 to 1.19
provides new pad related abstraction macros B::NV::COP_SEQ_RANGE_LOW
,
B::NV::COP_SEQ_RANGE_HIGH
, B::NV::PARENT_PAD_INDEX
,
B::NV::PARENT_FAKELEX_FLAGS
, which hides the difference in storage in
5.10.0 and later.
provides B::sub_generation
, which exposes PL_sub_generation
provides B::GV::isGV_with_GP
, which on pre-5.10 perls always returns true.
New type B::HE
added with methods VAL
, HASH
and SVKEY_force
The B::GVf_IMPORTED_CV
flag is now set correctly when a proxy
constant subroutine is imported.
bugs fixed in the handling of PMOP
s.
B::BM::PREVIOUS
returns now U32
, not U16
.
B::CV::START
and B:CV::ROOT
return now NULL
on an XSUB,
B::CV::XSUB
and B::CV::XSUBANY
return 0 on a non-XSUB.
B::C
upgraded to 1.05
B::Concise
upgraded to 0.76
new option -src
causes the rendering of each statement (starting with
the nextstate OP) to be preceded by the first line of source code that
generates it.
new option -stash="somepackage"
, requires "somepackage", and then renders
each function defined in its namespace.
now has documentation of detailed hint symbols.
B::Debug
upgraded to version 1.05
B::Deparse
upgraded to version 0.87
now handles ''-
()>, ::()
, sub :: {}
, etc. correctly [RT #43010].
All bugs in parsing these kinds of syntax are now fixed:
- perl -MO=Deparse -e '"my %h = "->()'
- perl -MO=Deparse -e '::->()'
- perl -MO=Deparse -e 'sub :: {}'
- perl -MO=Deparse -e 'package a; sub a::b::c {}'
- perl -MO=Deparse -e 'sub the::main::road {}'
does not deparse $^H{v_string}
, which is automatically set by the
internals.
B::Lint
upgraded to version 1.11
B::Terse
upgraded to version 1.05
base
upgraded to version 2.13
loading a module via base.pm would mask a global $SIG{__DIE__}
in that
module.
push all classes at once in @ISA
Benchmark
upgraded to version 1.10
bigint
upgraded to 0.23
bignum
upgraded to 0.23
bigrat
upgraded to 0.23
blib
upgraded to 0.04
Carp
upgraded to version 1.10
The argument backtrace code now shows undef as undef,
instead of a string "undef".
CGI
upgraded to version 3.42
charnames
upgraded to 1.06
constant
upgraded to version 1.17
CPAN
upgraded to version 1.9301
Cwd
upgraded to version 3.29 with some platform specific
improvements (including for VMS).
Data::Dumper
upgraded to version 2.121_17
Fixes hash iterator current position with the pure Perl version [RT #40668]
Performance enhancements, which will be most evident on platforms where
repeated calls to C's realloc()
are slow, such as Win32.
DB_File
upgraded to version 1.817
DB_Filter
upgraded to version 0.02
Devel::DProf
upgraded to version 20080331.00
Devel::Peek
upgraded to version 1.04
Devel::PPPort
upgraded to version 3.14
diagnostics
upgraded to version 1.16
Digest
upgraded to version 1.15
Digest::MD5
upgraded to version 2.37
DirHandle
upgraded to version 1.02
now localises $.
, $@
, $!
, $^E
, and $?
before closing the
directory handle to suppress leaking any side effects of warnings about it
already being closed.
DynaLoader
upgraded to version 1.09
DynaLoader
can now dynamically load a loadable object from a file with a
non-default file extension.
Encode
upgraded to version 2.26
Encode::Alias
includes a fix for encoding "646" on Solaris (better known as
ASCII).
English
upgraded to version 1.03
Errno
upgraded to version 1.10
Exporter
upgraded to version 5.63
ExtUtils::Command
upgraded to version 1.15
ExtUtils::Constant
upgraded to version 0.21
ExtUtils::Embed
upgraded to version 1.28
ExtUtils::Install
upgraded to version 1.50_01
ExtUtils::Installed
upgraded to version 1.43
ExtUtils::MakeMaker
upgraded to version 6.48
support for INSTALLSITESCRIPT
and INSTALLVENDORSCRIPT
configuration.
ExtUtils::Manifest
upgraded to version 1.55
ExtUtils::ParseXS
upgraded to version 2.19
Fatal
upgraded to version 1.06
allows built-ins in CORE::GLOBAL
to be made fatal.
Fcntl
upgraded to version 1.06
fields
upgraded to version 2.12
File::Basename
upgraded to version 2.77
FileCache
upgraded to version 1.07
File::Compare
upgraded to 1.1005
File::Copy
upgraded to 2.13
now uses 3-arg open.
File::DosGlob
upgraded to 1.01
File::Find
upgraded to version 1.13
File::Glob
upgraded to version 1.06
fixes spurious results with brackets inside braces.
File::Path
upgraded to version 2.07_02
File::Spec
upgraded to version 3.29
improved handling of bad arguments.
some platform specific improvements (including for VMS and Cygwin), with
an optimisation on abs2rel
when handling both relative arguments.
File::stat
upgraded to version 1.01
File::Temp
upgraded to version 0.20
filetest
upgraded to version 1.02
Filter::Util::Call
upgraded to version 1.07
Filter::Simple
upgraded to version 0.83
FindBin
upgraded to version 1.49
GDBM_File
upgraded to version 1.09
Getopt::Long
upgraded to version 2.37
Getopt::Std
upgraded to version 1.06
Hash::Util
upgraded to version 0.06
if
upgraded to version 0.05
IO
upgraded to version 1.23
Reduced number of calls to getpeername in IO::Socket
IPC::Open
upgraded to version 1.03
IPC::Open3
upgraded to version 1.03
IPC::SysV
upgraded to version 2.00
lib
upgraded to version 0.61
avoid warning about loading .par files.
libnet
upgraded to version 1.22
List::Util
upgraded to 1.19
Locale::Maketext
upgraded to 1.13
Math::BigFloat
upgraded to version 1.60
Math::BigInt
upgraded to version 1.89
Math::BigRat
upgraded to version 0.22
implements new as_float
method.
Math::Complex
upgraded to version 1.54.
Math::Trig
upgraded to version 1.18.
NDBM_File
upgraded to version 1.07
improve g++ handling for systems using GDBM compatibility headers.
Net::Ping
upgraded to version 2.35
NEXT
upgraded to version 0.61
fix several bugs with NEXT
when working with AUTOLOAD
, eval block, and
within overloaded stringification.
ODBM_File
upgraded to 1.07
open upgraded to 1.06
ops
upgraded to 1.02
PerlIO::encoding
upgraded to version 0.11
PerlIO::scalar
upgraded to version 0.06
[RT #40267] PerlIO::scalar
doesn't respect readonly-ness.
PerlIO::via
upgraded to version 0.05
Pod::Html
upgraded to version 1.09
Pod::Parser
upgraded to version 1.35
Pod::Usage
upgraded to version 1.35
POSIX
upgraded to version 1.15
POSIX
constants that duplicate those in Fcntl
are now imported from
Fcntl
and re-exported, rather than being duplicated by POSIX
POSIX::remove
can remove empty directories.
POSIX::setlocale
safer to call multiple times.
POSIX::SigRt
added, which provides access to POSIX realtime signal
functionality on systems that support it.
re
upgraded to version 0.06_01
Safe
upgraded to version 2.16
Scalar::Util
upgraded to 1.19
SDBM_File
upgraded to version 1.06
SelfLoader
upgraded to version 1.17
Shell
upgraded to version 0.72
sigtrap
upgraded to version 1.04
Socket
upgraded to version 1.81
this fixes an optimistic use of gethostbyname
Storable
upgraded to 2.19
Switch
upgraded to version 2.13
Sys::Syslog
upgraded to version 0.27
Term::ANSIColor
upgraded to version 1.12
Term::Cap
upgraded to version 1.12
Term::ReadLine
upgraded to version 1.03
Test::Builder
upgraded to version 0.80
Test::Harness
upgraded version to 2.64
this makes it able to handle newlines.
Test::More
upgraded to version 0.80
Test::Simple
upgraded to version 0.80
Text::Balanced
upgraded to version 1.98
Text::ParseWords
upgraded to version 3.27
Text::Soundex
upgraded to version 3.03
Text::Tabs
upgraded to version 2007.1117
Text::Wrap
upgraded to version 2006.1117
Thread
upgraded to version 2.01
Thread::Semaphore
upgraded to version 2.09
Thread::Queue
upgraded to version 2.11
added capability to add complex structures (e.g., hash of hashes) to queues.
added capability to dequeue multiple items at once.
added new methods to inspect and manipulate queues: peek
, insert
and
extract
Tie::Handle
upgraded to version 4.2
Tie::Hash
upgraded to version 1.03
Tie::Memoize
upgraded to version 1.1
Tie::Memoize::EXISTS
now correctly caches its results.
Tie::RefHash
upgraded to version 1.38
Tie::Scalar
upgraded to version 1.01
Tie::StdHandle
upgraded to version 4.2
Time::gmtime
upgraded to version 1.03
Time::Local
upgraded to version 1.1901
Time::HiRes
upgraded to version 1.9715 with various build improvements
(including VMS) and minor platform-specific bug fixes (including
for HP-UX 11 ia64).
threads
upgraded to 1.71
threads::shared
upgraded to version 1.27
smaller and faster implementation that eliminates one internal structure and the consequent level of indirection.
user locks are now stored in a safer manner.
new function shared_clone
creates a copy of an object leaving
shared elements as-is and deep-cloning non-shared elements.
added new is_shared
method.
Unicode::Normalize
upgraded to version 1.02
Unicode::UCD
upgraded to version 0.25
warnings
upgraded to version 1.05_01
Win32
upgraded to version 0.38
added new function GetCurrentProcessId
which returns the regular Windows
process identifier of the current process, even when called from within a fork.
XSLoader
upgraded to version 0.10
XS::APItest
and XS::Typemap
are for internal use only and hence
no longer installed. Many more tests have been added to XS::APItest
.
Andreas König contributed two functions to save and load the debugger history.
NEXT::AUTOLOAD
no longer emits warnings under the debugger.
The debugger should now correctly find tty the device on OS X 10.5 and VMS
when the program forks.
LVALUE subs now work inside the debugger.
Perl 5.8.9 adds a new utility perlthanks, which is a variant of perlbug, but for sending non-bug-reports to the authors and maintainers of Perl. Getting nothing but bug reports can become a bit demoralising - we'll see if this changes things.
perlbug now checks if you're reporting about a non-core module and suggests you report it to the CPAN author instead.
won't define an empty string as a constant [RT #25366]
has examples for h2xs -X
now attempts to deal sensibly with the difference in path implications
between ""
and <>
quoting in #include
statements.
now generates correct code for #if defined A || defined B
[RT #39130]
As usual, the documentation received its share of corrections, clarifications
and other nitfixes. More
tags were added for indexing.
perlunitut is a tutorial written by Juerd Waalboer on Unicode-related terminology and how to correctly handle Unicode in Perl scripts.
perlunicode is updated in section user defined properties.
perluniintro has been updated in the example of detecting data that is not valid in particular encoding.
perlcommunity provides an overview of the Perl Community along with further resources.
CORE documents the pseudo-namespace for Perl's core routines.
perlglossary adds deprecated modules and features and to be dropped modules.
perlhack has been updated and added resources on smoke testing.
The Perl FAQs (perlfaq1..perlfaq9) have been updated.
perlcheat is updated with better details on \w
, \d
, and \s.
perldebug is updated with information on how to call the debugger.
perldiag documentation updated with subroutine with an ampersand on the
argument to exists and delete and also several terminology updates on
warnings.
perlfork documents the limitation of exec inside pseudo-processes.
Function alarm now mentions Time::HiRes::ualarm
in preference
to select.
Regarding precedence in -X, filetest operators are the same as unary
operators, but not regarding parsing and parentheses (spotted by Eirik Berg
Hanssen).
reverse function documentation received scalar context examples.
perllocale documentation is adjusted for number localization and
POSIX::setlocale
to fix Debian bug #379463.
perlmodlib is updated with CPAN::API::HOWTO
and
Sys::Syslog::win32::Win32
perlre documentation updated to reflect the differences between
[[:xxxxx:]] and \p{IsXxxxx}
matches. Also added section on /g and
/c modifiers.
perlreguts describe the internals of the regular expressions engine. It has been contributed by Yves Orton.
perlrebackslash describes all perl regular expression backslash and escape sequences.
perlrecharclass describes the syntax and use of character classes in Perl Regular Expressions.
perlrun is updated to clarify on the hash seed PERL_HASH_SEED. Also more
information in options -x
and -u
.
perlsub example is updated to use a lexical variable for opendir syntax.
perlvar fixes confusion about real GID $(
and effective GID $)
.
Perl thread tutorial example is fixed in section Queues: Passing Data Around in perlthrtut and perlthrtut.
perlhack documentation extensively improved by Jarkko Hietaniemi and others.
perltoot provides information on modifying @UNIVERSAL::ISA
.
perlport documentation extended to include different kill(-9, ...)
semantics on Windows. It also clearly states dump is not supported on Win32
and cygwin.
INSTALL has been updated and modernised.
The default since perl 5.000 has been for perl to create an empty scalar
with every new typeglob. The increased use of lexical variables means that
most are now unused. Thanks to Nicholas Clark's efforts, Perl can now be
compiled with -DPERL_DONT_CREATE_GVSV
to avoid creating these empty scalars.
This will significantly decrease the number of scalars allocated for all
configurations, and the number of scalars that need to be copied for ithread
creation. Whilst this option is binary compatible with existing perl
installations, it does change a long-standing assumption about the
internals, hence it is not enabled by default, as some third party code may
rely on the old behaviour.
We would recommend testing with this configuration on new deployments of perl, particularly for multi-threaded servers, to see whether all third party code is compatible with it, as this configuration may give useful performance improvements. For existing installations we would not recommend changing to this configuration unless thorough testing is performed before deployment.
diagnostics
no longer uses $&
, which results in large speedups
for regexp matching in all code using it.
Regular expressions classes of a single character are now treated the same as if the character had been used as a literal, meaning that code that uses char-classes as an escaping mechanism will see a speedup. (Yves Orton)
Creating anonymous array and hash references (ie. []
and {}
) now incurs
no more overhead than creating an anonymous list or hash. Nicholas Clark
provided changes with a saving of two ops and one stack push, which was measured
as a slightly better than 5% improvement for these operations.
Many calls to strlen()
have been eliminated, either because the length was
already known, or by adopting or enhancing APIs that pass lengths. This has
been aided by the adoption of a my_sprintf()
wrapper, which returns the
correct C89 value - the length of the formatted string. Previously we could
not rely on the return value of sprintf(), because on some ancient but
extant platforms it still returns char *
.
index is now faster if the search string is stored in UTF-8 but only contains
characters in the Latin-1 range.
The Unicode swatch cache inside the regexp engine is now used. (the lookup had a key mismatch, present since the initial implementation). [RT #42839]
There is now Configure support for creating a relocatable perl tree. If
you Configure with -Duserelocatableinc
, then the paths in @INC
(and
everything else in %Config
) can be optionally located via the path of the
perl executable.
At start time, if any paths in @INC
or Config
that Configure marked
as relocatable (by starting them with ".../"
), then they are prefixed the
directory of $^X
. This allows the relocation can be configured on a
per-directory basis, although the default with -Duserelocatableinc
is that
everything is relocated. The initial install is done to the original configured
prefix.
Configure is now better at removing temporary files. Tom Callaway
(from RedHat) also contributed patches that complete the set of flags
passed to the compiler and the linker, in particular that -fPIC
is now
enabled on Linux. It will also croak when your /dev/null isn't a device.
A new configuration variable d_pseudofork
has been to Configure, and is
available as $Config{d_pseudofork}
in the Config
module. This
distinguishes real fork support from the pseudofork emulation used on
Windows platforms.
Config.pod and config.sh are now placed correctly for cross-compilation.
$Config{useshrplib}
is now 'true' rather than 'yes' when using a shared perl
library.
Parallel makes should work properly now, although there may still be problems
if make test
is instructed to run in parallel.
Many compilation warnings have been cleaned up. A very stubborn compiler
warning in S_emulate_eaccess()
was killed after six attempts.
g++ support has been tuned, especially for FreeBSD.
mkppport has been integrated, and all ppport.h files in the core will now be autogenerated at build time (and removed during cleanup).
installman now works with -Duserelocatableinc
and DESTDIR
.
installperl no longer installs:
static library files of statically linked extensions when a shared perl library is being used. (They are not needed. See Windows below).
SIGNATURE and PAUSE*.pub (CPAN files)
NOTES and PATCHING (ExtUtils files)
perlld and ld2 (Cygwin files)
There are improved hints for AIX, Cygwin, DEC/OSF, FreeBSD, HP/UX, Irix 6 Linux, MachTen, NetBSD, OS/390, QNX, SCO, Solaris, SunOS, System V Release 5.x (UnixWare 7, OpenUNIX 8), Ultrix, UMIPS, uts and VOS.
Drop -std=c89
and -ansi
if using long long
as the main integral type,
else in FreeBSD 6.2 (and perhaps other releases), system headers do not
declare some functions required by perl.
Starting with Solaris 10, we do not want versioned shared libraries, because
those often indicate a private use only library. These problems could often
be triggered when SUNWbdb (Berkeley DB) was installed. Hence if Solaris 10
is detected set ignore_versioned_solibs=y.
Allow IEEE math to be deselected on OpenVMS I64 (but it remains the default).
Record IEEE usage in config.h
Help older VMS compilers by using ccflags
when building munchconfig.exe
.
Don't try to build old Thread
extension on VMS when -Duseithreads
has
been chosen.
Passing a raw string of "NaN" to nawk causes a core dump - so the string has been changed to "*NaN*"
t/op/stat.t tests will now test hard links on VMS if they are supported.
When using a shared perl library installperl no longer installs static library files, import library files and export library files (of statically linked extensions) and empty bootstrap files (of dynamically linked extensions). This fixes a problem building PAR-Packer on Win32 with a debug build of perl.
Various improvements to the win32 build process, including support for Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition (aka Visual C++ 8.x).
perl.exe will now have an icon if built with MinGW or Borland.
Improvements to the perl-static.exe build process.
Add Win32 makefile option to link all extensions statically.
The WinCE directory has been merged into the Win32 directory.
setlocale
tests have been re-enabled for Windows XP onwards.
Many many bugs related to the internal Unicode implementation (UTF-8) have
been fixed. In particular, long standing bugs related to returning Unicode
via tie, overloading or $@
are now gone, some of which were never
reported.
unpack will internally convert the string back from UTF-8 on numeric types.
This is a compromise between the full consistency now in 5.10, and the current
behaviour, which is often used as a "feature" on string types.
Using :crlf
and UTF-16
IO layers together will now work.
Fixed problems with split, Unicode /\s+/
and / \0/
.
Fixed bug RT #40641 - encoding of Unicode characters in regular expressions.
Fixed a bug where using certain patterns in a regexp led to a panic. [RT #45337]
Perl no longer segfaults (due to infinite internal recursion) if the locale's character is not UTF-8 [RT #41442]:
Inconsistencies have been fixed in the reference counting PerlIO uses to keep
track of Unix file descriptors, and the API used by XS code to manage getting
and releasing FILE *
s
Several bugs have been fixed in Magic, the internal system used to implement
features such as tie, tainting and threads sharing.
undef @array
on a tied array now correctly calls the CLEAR
method.
Some of the bitwise ops were not checking whether their arguments were magical before using them. [RT #24816]
Magic is no longer invoked twice by the expression \&$x
A bug with assigning large numbers and tainting has been resolved. [RT #40708]
A new entry has been added to the MAGIC vtable - svt_local
. This is used
when copying magic to the new value during local, allowing certain problems
with localising shared variables to be resolved.
For the implementation details, see Magic Virtual Tables in perlguts.
Internally, perl object-ness is on the referent, not the reference, even though methods can only be called via a reference. However, the original implementation of overloading stored flags related to overloading on the reference, relying on the flags being copied when the reference was copied, or set at the creation of a new reference. This manifests in a bug - if you rebless an object from a class that has overloading, into one that does not, then any other existing references think that they (still) point to an overloaded object, choose these C code paths, and then throw errors. Analogously, blessing into an overloaded class when other references exist will result in them not using overloading.
The implementation has been fixed for 5.10, but this fix changes the semantics of flag bits, so is not binary compatible, so can't be applied to 5.8.9. However, 5.8.9 has a work-around that implements the same bug fix. If the referent has multiple references, then all the other references are located and corrected. A full search is avoided whenever possible by scanning lexicals outwards from the current subroutine, and the argument stack.
A certain well known Linux vendor applied incomplete versions of this bug fix to their /usr/bin/perl and then prematurely closed bug reports about performance issues without consulting back upstream. This not being enough, they then proceeded to ignore the necessary fixes to these unreleased changes for 11 months, until massive pressure was applied by their long-suffering paying customers, catalysed by the failings being featured on a prominent blog and Slashdot.
strict
now propagates correctly into string evalsUnder 5.8.8 and earlier:
- $ perl5.8.8 -e 'use strict; eval "use foo bar" or die $@'
- Can't locate foo.pm in @INC (@INC contains: ... .) at (eval 1) line 2.
- BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at (eval 1) line 2.
Under 5.8.9 and later:
- $ perl5.8.9 -e 'use strict; eval "use foo bar" or die $@'
- Bareword "bar" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at (eval 1) line 1.
This may cause problems with programs that parse the error message and rely on the buggy behaviour.
The tokenizer no longer treats =cute
(and other words beginning
with =cut
) as a synonym for =cut
.
Calling CORE::require
CORE::require
and CORE::do
were always parsed as require and do
when they were overridden. This is now fixed.
Stopped memory leak on long /etc/groups entries.
while (my $x ...) { ...; redo }
shouldn't undef $x
.
In the presence of my in the conditional of a while()
, until()
,
or for(;;)
loop, we now add an extra scope to the body so that redo
doesn't undef the lexical.
The encoding
pragma now correctly ignores anything following an @
character in the LC_ALL
and LANG
environment variables. [RT # 49646]
A segfault observed with some gcc 3.3 optimisations is resolved.
A possible segfault when unpack used in scalar context with ()
groups
is resolved. [RT #50256]
Resolved issue where $!
could be changed by a signal handler interrupting
a system call.
Fixed bug RT #37886, symbolic dereferencing was allowed in the argument of
defined even under the influence of use strict 'refs'
.
Fixed bug RT #43207, where lc/uc inside sort affected the return
value.
Fixed bug RT #45607, where *{"BONK"} = \&{"BONK"}
didn't work correctly.
Fixed bug RT #35878, croaking from a XSUB called via goto &xsub
corrupts perl
internals.
Fixed bug RT #32539, DynaLoader.o is moved into libperl.so to avoid the need to statically link DynaLoader into the stub perl executable. With this libperl.so provides everything needed to get a functional embedded perl interpreter to run.
Fix bug RT #36267 so that assigning to a tied hash doesn't change the underlying hash.
Fix bug RT #6006, regexp replaces using large replacement variables
fail some of the time, i.e. when substitution contains something
like ${10}
(note the bracket) instead of just $10
.
Fix bug RT #45053, Perl_newCONSTSUB()
is now thread safe.
Various improvements to 64 bit builds.
Mutex protection added in PerlIOStdio_close()
to avoid race conditions.
Hopefully this fixes failures in the threads tests free.t and blocks.t.
Added forked terminal support to the debugger, with the ability to update the window title.
A build problem with specifying USE_MULTI
and USE_ITHREADS
but without
USE_IMP_SYS
has been fixed.
OS2::REXX
upgraded to version 1.04
Aligned floating point build policies for cc and gcc.
Revisited a patch from 5.6.1 for RH7.2 for Intel's icc [RT #7916], added an
additional check for $Config{gccversion}
.
Use -DPTR_IS_LONG
when using 64 bit integers
Fixed PerlIO::Scalar
in-memory file record-style reads.
pipe shutdown at process exit should now be more robust.
Bugs in VMS exit handling tickled by Test::Harness
2.64 have been fixed.
Fix fcntl() locking capability test in configure.com.
Replaced shrplib='define'
with useshrplib='true'
on VMS.
File::Find
used to fail when the target directory is a bare drive letter and
no_chdir
is 1 (the default is 0). [RT #41555]
A build problem with specifying USE_MULTI
and USE_ITHREADS
but without
USE_IMP_SYS
has been fixed.
The process id is no longer truncated to 16 bits on some Windows platforms ( http://bugs.activestate.com/show_bug.cgi?id=72443 )
Fixed bug RT #54828 in perlio.c where calling binmode on Win32 and Cygwin
may cause a segmentation fault.
It is now possible to overload eq
when using nomethod
.
Various problems using overload
with 64 bit integers corrected.
The reference count of PerlIO
file descriptors is now correctly handled.
On VMS, escaped dots will be preserved when converted to Unix syntax.
keys %+
no longer throws an 'ambiguous'
warning.
Using #!perl -d
could trigger an assertion, which has been fixed.
Don't stringify tied code references in @INC
when calling require.
Code references in @INC
report the correct file name when __FILE__
is
used.
Width and precision in sprintf didn't handle characters above 255 correctly. [RT #40473]
List slices with indices out of range now work more consistently. [RT #39882]
A change introduced with perl 5.8.1 broke the parsing of arguments of the form
-foo=bar
with the -s
on the <#!> line. This has been fixed. See
http://bugs.activestate.com/show_bug.cgi?id=43483
tr/// is now threadsafe. Previously it was storing a swash inside its OP,
rather than in a pad.
pod2html labels anchors more consistently and handles nested definition lists better.
threads
cleanup veto has been extended to include perl_free()
and
perl_destruct()
On some systems, changes to $ENV{TZ}
would not always be
respected by the underlying calls to localtime_r()
. Perl now
forces the inspection of the environment on these systems.
The special variable $^R
is now more consistently set when executing
regexps using the (?{...}) construct. In particular, it will still
be set even if backreferences or optional sub-patterns (?:...)? are
used.
This new fatal error occurs when the C routine Perl_sv_chop()
was passed a
position that is not within the scalar's string buffer. This is caused by
buggy XS code, and at this point recovery is not possible.
This new fatal error occurs when the perl process has to abort due to too many pending signals, which is bound to prevent perl from being able to handle further incoming signals safely.
This new fatal error occurs when the ACL version file test operator is used where it is not available on the current platform. Earlier checks mean that it should never be possible to get this.
New error indicating that a tied array has claimed to have a negative number of elements.
Previously the internal error from the SV upgrade code was the less informative Can't upgrade that kind of scalar. It now reports the current internal type, and the new type requested.
This error, thrown if an invalid argument is provided to exists now
correctly includes "or a subroutine". [RT #38955]
This error in Fatal
previously did not show the name of the builtin in
question (now represented by %s above).
This error previously did not state the column.
This can now also be generated by a seek on a file handle using
PerlIO::scalar
.
New error, introduced as part of the fix to RT #40641 to handle encoding of Unicode characters in regular expression comments.
A more informative fatal error issued when calling dump on Win32 and
Cygwin. (Given that the purpose of dump is to abort with a core dump,
and core dumps can't be produced on these platforms, this is more useful than
silently exiting.)
The perl sources can now be compiled with a C++ compiler instead of a C
compiler. A necessary implementation details is that under C++, the macro
XS
used to define XSUBs now includes an extern "C"
definition. A side
effect of this is that C++ code that used the construction
- typedef XS(SwigPerlWrapper);
now needs to be written
- typedef XSPROTO(SwigPerlWrapper);
using the new XSPROTO
macro, in order to compile. C extensions are
unaffected, although C extensions are encouraged to use XSPROTO
too.
This change was present in the 5.10.0 release of perl, so any actively
maintained code that happened to use this construction should already have
been adapted. Code that needs changing will fail with a compilation error.
set
magic on localizing/assigning to a magic variable will now only
trigger for container magics, i.e. it will for %ENV
or %SIG
but not for $#array
.
The new API macro newSVpvs()
can be used in place of constructions such as
newSVpvn("ISA", 3)
. It takes a single string constant, and at C compile
time determines its length.
The new API function Perl_newSV_type()
can be used as a more efficient
replacement of the common idiom
- sv = newSV(0);
- sv_upgrade(sv, type);
Similarly Perl_newSVpvn_flags()
can be used to combine
Perl_newSVpv()
with Perl_sv_2mortal()
or the equivalent
Perl_sv_newmortal()
with Perl_sv_setpvn()
Two new macros mPUSHs()
and mXPUSHs()
are added, to make it easier to
push mortal SVs onto the stack. They were then used to fix several bugs where
values on the stack had not been mortalised.
A Perl_signbit()
function was added to test the sign of an NV
. It
maps to the system one when available.
Perl_av_reify()
, Perl_lex_end()
, Perl_mod()
, Perl_op_clear()
,
Perl_pop_return()
, Perl_qerror()
, Perl_setdefout()
,
Perl_vivify_defelem()
and Perl_yylex()
are now visible to extensions.
This was required to allow Data::Alias
to work on Windows.
Perl_find_runcv()
is now visible to perl core extensions. This was required
to allow Sub::Current
to work on Windows.
ptr_table*
functions are now available in unthreaded perl. Storable
takes advantage of this.
There have been many small cleanups made to the internals. In particular,
Perl_sv_upgrade()
has been simplified considerably, with a straight-through
code path that uses memset()
and memcpy()
to initialise the new body,
rather than assignment via multiple temporary variables. It has also
benefited from simplification and de-duplication of the arena management
code.
A lot of small improvements in the code base were made due to reports from the Coverity static code analyzer.
Corrected use and documentation of Perl_gv_stashpv()
, Perl_gv_stashpvn()
,
Perl_gv_stashsv()
functions (last parameter is a bitmask, not boolean).
PERL_SYS_INIT
, PERL_SYS_INIT3
and PERL_SYS_TERM
macros have been
changed into functions.
PERLSYS_TERM
no longer requires a context. PerlIO_teardown()
is now called without a context, and debugging output in this function has
been disabled because that required that an interpreter was present, an invalid
assumption at termination time.
All compile time options which affect binary compatibility have been grouped
together into a global variable (PL_bincompat_options
).
The values of PERL_REVISION
, PERL_VERSION
and PERL_SUBVERSION
are
now baked into global variables (and hence into any shared perl library).
Additionally under MULTIPLICITY
, the perl executable now records the size of
the interpreter structure (total, and for this version). Coupled with
PL_bincompat_options
this will allow 5.8.10 (and later), when compiled with a
shared perl library, to perform sanity checks in main()
to verify that the
shared library is indeed binary compatible.
Symbolic references can now have embedded NULs. The new public function
Perl_get_cvn_flags()
can be used in extensions if you have to handle them.
The core code, and XS code in ext that is not dual-lived on CPAN, no longer
uses the macros PL_na
, NEWSV()
, Null()
, Nullav
, Nullcv
,
Nullhv
, Nullhv
etc. Their use is discouraged in new code,
particularly PL_na
, which is a small performance hit.
Many modules updated from CPAN incorporate new tests. Some core specific tests have been added:
Tests for the DynaLoader
module.
Tests for compile-time constant folding.
Tests incorporated from 5.10.0 which check that there is no unexpected
interaction between the internal types PVBM
and PVGV
.
Tests for the new form of constant subroutines.
Tests for Attribute::Handlers
.
Tests for dbmopen.
Calls all tests in t/op/inccode.t after first tying @INC
.
Tests for source filters returned from code references in @INC
.
Tests for RT #30970.
Tests for RT #41484.
Tests for the qr// construct.
Tests for the qr// construct within another regexp.
Tests for the qr// construct.
Tests for RT #32840.
Tests for study on tied scalars.
Tests for subst
run under -T
mode.
Tests for undef and delete on stash entries that are bound to
subroutines or methods.
Tests for Perl_sv_upgrade()
.
MRO tests for isa
and package aliases.
Tests for calling Pod::Parser
twice.
Tests for inheriting file descriptors across exec (close-on-exec).
Tests for the UTF-8 caching code.
Test that strange encodings do not upset Perl_pp_chr()
.
Tests for RT #40641.
Tests for RT #40641.
Tests for returning Unicode from overloaded values.
Tests for returning Unicode from tied variables.
There are no known new bugs.
However, programs that rely on bugs that have been fixed will have problems. Also, many bug fixes present in 5.10.0 can't be back-ported to the 5.8.x branch, because they require changes that are binary incompatible, or because the code changes are too large and hence too risky to incorporate.
We have only limited volunteer labour, and the maintenance burden is getting increasingly complex. Hence this will be the last significant release of the 5.8.x series. Any future releases of 5.8.x will likely only be to deal with security issues, and platform build failures. Hence you should look to migrating to 5.10.x, if you have not started already. Alternatively, if business requirements constrain you to continue to use 5.8.x, you may wish to consider commercial support from firms such as ActiveState.
readdir(), cwd()
, $^X
and @INC
now use the alternate (short)
filename if the long name is outside the current codepage (Jan Dubois).
Win32
upgraded to version 0.38. Now has a documented 'WinVista' response
from GetOSName
and support for Vista's privilege elevation in IsAdminUser
.
Support for Unicode characters in path names. Improved cygwin and Win64
compatibility.
Win32API
updated to 0.1001_01
killpg()
support added to MSWin32
(Jan Dubois).
File::Spec::Win32
upgraded to version 3.2701
OS2::Process
upgraded to 1.03
Ilya Zakharevich has added and documented several Window*
and Clipbrd*
functions.
OS2::REXX::DLL
, OS2::REXX
updated to version 1.03
DCLsym
upgraded to version 1.03
Stdio
upgraded to version 2.4
VMS::XSSymSet
upgraded to 1.1.
Nick Ing-Simmons, long time Perl hacker, author of the Tk
and Encode
modules, perlio.c in the core, and 5.003_02 pumpking, died of a heart
attack on 25th September 2006. He will be missed.
Some of the work in this release was funded by a TPF grant.
Steve Hay worked behind the scenes working out the causes of the differences between core modules, their CPAN releases, and previous core releases, and the best way to rectify them. He doesn't want to do it again. I know this feeling, and I'm very glad he did it this time, instead of me.
Paul Fenwick assembled a team of 18 volunteers, who broke the back of writing this document. In particular, Bradley Dean, Eddy Tan, and Vincent Pit provided half the team's contribution.
Schwern verified the list of updated module versions, correcting quite a few errors that I (and everyone else) had missed, both wrongly stated module versions, and changed modules that had not been listed.
The crack Berlin-based QA team of Andreas König and Slaven Rezic tirelessly re-built snapshots, tested most everything CPAN against them, and then identified the changes responsible for any module regressions, ensuring that several show-stopper bugs were stomped before the first release candidate was cut.
The other core committers contributed most of the changes, and applied most of the patches sent in by the hundreds of contributors listed in AUTHORS.
And obviously, Larry Wall, without whom we wouldn't have Perl.
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://bugs.perl.org. 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 [email protected] to be
analysed by the Perl porting team. You can browse and search
the Perl 5 bugs at http://bugs.perl.org/
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 [email protected]. This points to a closed subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core committers, who will be 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 only use this address for security issues in the Perl core, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN.
The Changes file for 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.