PERL5123DELTA(1)

💖 PERL5123DELTA 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the Perl Programmers Reference Guide glow-up edition of PERL5123DELTA(1). sit down, grab a strawberry drink 🍓, and let's gossip about what's new in perl.

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✨ NAME ✨

perl5123delta — what is new for perl v5.12.3 💅

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so this doc is literally just the tea on what changed between the 5.12.2 release and the 5.12.3 release. that's it. that's the whole vibe.

if you're upgrading from something even older, like 5.12.1, bestie you gotta read perl5122delta first — it covers the 5.12.1 → 5.12.2 situation. and the big main-character changes from 5.12.0? those live in perl5120delta. iykyk.

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💀 Incompatible Changes 💀

okay so the good news is: there are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.12.2. none. zero. nada. 🎀

but if you find any? those are bugs, and reports are welcome. we want them fr fr.

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👑 Core Enhancements 👑

🌈 "keys", "values" work on arrays 🌈

omg okay this is the iconic one. you can now use the "keys", "values", and "each" builtin functions on arrays — previously you could only use them on hashes. the way that just opens up possibilities?? obsessed.

see perlfunc for the details.

real talk though: this is actually a change that was introduced in perl 5.12.0, but it got left out of that release's perldelta. so we're giving it its moment now. better late than never ✨

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🦋 Bug Fixes 🦋

• "no VERSION" will now correctly deparse with B::Deparse, and so will certain constant expressions. slay.
• Module::Build should be more reliably pass its tests under cygwin. no more flaky test energy 🙈
• Lvalue subroutines are again able to return copy-on-write scalars. this had been broken since version 5.10.0 😭 so yeah, that's a long time to be broken. fixed now though. periodt.

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🌟 Platform Specific Notes 🌟

☀️ Solaris

A separate DTrace is now built for miniperl, which means perl can be compiled with -Dusedtrace on Solaris again. we're so back.

🧊 VMS

A number of regressions on VMS have been fixed. plus, in addition to minor cleanup of questionable expressions in vms.c:

• file permissions should no longer be garbled by the PerlIO layer
• spurious record boundaries should no longer be introduced by the PerlIO layer during output

for more details and discussion on that last one, see:

http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.vmsperl/2010/11/msg15419.html

🫶 VOS

A few very small changes were made to the build process on VOS to better support the platform. specifically:

• Longer-than-32-character filenames are now supported on OpenVOS
• and it builds properly without IPv6 support

small changes, big impact. 💜

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🎀 Acknowledgements 🎀

Perl 5.12.3 represents approximately four months of development since Perl 5.12.2, and contains approximately 2500 lines of changes across 54 files from 16 authors. the dedication?? unmatched.

Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. the following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.12.3:

Craig A. Berry, David Golden, David Leadbeater, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, Jesse Vincent, Karl Williamson, Nick Johnston, Nicolas Kaiser, Paul Green, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Rainer Tammer, Ricardo Signes, Steffen Mueller, Zsbán Ambrus, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

giving main character energy, all sixteen of them 👑

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🐛 Reporting Bugs 🐛

if you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug database at http://rt.perl.org/perlbug/. there may also be information at http://www.perl.org/, the Perl Home Page. do your research first bestie, no cap.

if you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug program included with your release. and listen — be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. tiny. minimal. cute. 🎀

your bug report, along with the output of perl -V, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by the Perl porting team.

⚠️ security tea incoming ⚠️ if the bug you're reporting has security implications, which make it inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org. This points to a closed subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core committers, who 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. fr fr, don't be out here leaking things. 🙈

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💖 SEE ALSO 💖

• The Changes file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details on what changed.
• The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
• The README file for general stuff.
• The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.

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and that's the whole page bestie, hope you ate this up 🍓✨

this was perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-08-03 — mwah, go forth and compile 💅🦋