PERL5163DELTA(1)

📦
version 5.42.3 · 22 versions
, in fedora 43, fedora 44

💖 perl5163delta — what is new for perl v5.16.3 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the PERL5163DELTA(1) glow-up ✨ this is the lil update letter for the Perl Programmers Reference Guide girlies, so grab a strawberry 🍓 and let's get into it

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

So this doc is literally just the tea on what changed between the 5.16.2 release and the 5.16.3 release. That's it. That's the whole vibe. 💅

And if you're out here upgrading from something even older, like 5.16.1? bestie, you gotta go read perl5162delta first, because that one covers the 5.16.1 → 5.16.2 of it all. no skipping steps, okay?? 🫶

✨ Core Enhancements ✨

No changes since 5.16.0. that's right, absolutely nothing new. the core said "we're good actually" and honestly? respect. 💀

🔥 Security 🔥

okay this is the part where we get serious for a sec because it's giving important. This release has one major security fix plus a handful of minor ones. The minor ones got bundled in mainly so the test suite can pass cleanly with the clang compiler's address sanitizer facility. fancy. 🧚

🚨 CVE-2013-1667: memory exhaustion with arbitrary hash keys

So picture this: someone comes at you with a carefully crafted set of hash keys (think arguments on a URL, iykyk). With the right evil little combo, they can make a hash eat up a huge amount of memory and CPU, and boom — possible Denial-of-Service. not cute at all. 😭

This problem has been fixed. slay. 💅

🌀 wrap-around with IO on long strings

Reading or writing strings bigger than 2**31 bytes in size could segfault, because of integer wraparound. yeah. that's the whole thing.

This problem has been fixed. 👑

💧 memory leak in Encode

The UTF-8 encoding implementation in Encode.xs had a memory leak, which has been fixed. hydrated and thriving now. ✨

🦋 Incompatible Changes 🦋

There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.16.0. And if you find any? bestie those are bugs and reports are very much welcome. we wanna know. 🙈

💜 Deprecations 💜

There have been no deprecations since 5.16.0. nothing got sent to the shadow realm. periodt. 💅

🎀 Modules and Pragmata 🎀

⭐ Updated Modules and Pragmata

  • Encode has been upgraded from version 2.44 to version 2.44_01. 💖
  • Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 2.76 to version 2.76_02. 🌸
  • XS::APItest has been upgraded from version 0.38 to version 0.39. 🌈

💀 Known Problems 💀

None. no problems. flawless. main character energy only. 👑

🫶 Acknowledgements 🫶

okay so Perl 5.16.3 represents approximately 4 months of development since Perl 5.16.2, and it contains approximately 870 lines of changes across 39 files from 7 authors. that's a lot of little hands making light work, fr fr. ✨

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 5.16.3:

  • Andy Dougherty
  • Chris 'BinGOs' Williams
  • Dave Rolsky
  • David Mitchell
  • Michael Schroeder
  • Ricardo Signes
  • Yves Orton

The list above is almost certainly incomplete, because it's automatically generated from version control history. In particular, it does not include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who reported issues to the Perl bug tracker. y'all are seen and loved too. 💖

For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors, please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.

🐛 Reporting Bugs 🐛

If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the 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 lil research first bestie 🔍

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 — like, we need the minimal repro, not the whole saga. 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. 💌

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 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. 🙏

🌈 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. ⚖️
and that's the whole page bestie, no notes, we ate 💅✨

this lil love letter is from the Perl Programmers Reference Guide, covering perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-08-03 🎀 mwah, go forth and upgrade responsibly 🦋💖

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