PERL5123DELTA(1perl)

📦
version 5.44.0 · 2 versions
, in arch rolling

💖 perl5123delta — what is new for perl v5.12.3 💖

okay bestie, this is PERL5123DELTA(1perl) from the Perl Programmers Reference Guide, and it's literally the tea on everything that changed in perl v5.12.3. grab a snack, we're going in 🍓

✨ NAME ✨

perl5123delta — what is new for perl v5.12.3 🦋

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

This doc spills the differences between the 5.12.2 release and the 5.12.3 release. periodt.

If you're upgrading from something earlier like 5.12.1, no cap, read perl5122delta first — that's the one that describes the differences between 5.12.1 and 5.12.2. And the big major changes from 5.12.0? Those live in perl5120delta. iykyk 💅

💀 Incompatible Changes 💀

There are literally no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.12.2. If any exist, they're bugs and reports are welcome. so if something breaks… it's giving "oops, not on purpose" 🙈

👑 Core Enhancements 👑

"keys", "values" work on arrays

You can now use the keys, values, and each builtin functions on arrays — previously you could only use them on hashes. iconic behavior fr fr. See perlfunc for the details.

ngl this is actually a change that got introduced back in perl 5.12.0, but it was missed from that release's perldelta. so we're dropping it here like a late text 👀

🔥 Bug Fixes 🔥

  • no VERSION will now correctly deparse with B::Deparse, and so will certain constant expressions.
  • Module::Build should more reliably pass its tests under cygwin.
  • Lvalue subroutines are again able to return copy-on-write scalars. this had been broken since version 5.10.0 — she's healed 💖

🌈 Platform Specific Notes 🌈

Solaris

A separate DTrace is now built for miniperl, which means perl can be compiled with -Dusedtrace on Solaris again. slay ✨

VMS

A number of regressions on VMS have been fixed. On top of some minor cleanup of questionable expressions in vms.c, file permissions should no longer be garbled by the PerlIO layer, and spurious record boundaries should no longer be introduced by the PerlIO layer during output. the vibe check passed.

For more details and discussion on the latter, 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. Longer-than-32-character filenames are now supported on OpenVOS, and build properly without IPv6 support. tiny changes, big main character energy 🎀

🫶 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 way that's a whole community working 😭

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

literally all icons, no notes 💜

🐛 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 🔍

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 — the smaller the better, she's giving minimalism ✨. 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.

⚠️ okay this part matters: 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. keep that one private, fr fr 🔒

👀 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 a wrap 💅 this was perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17, and the whole thing came to you courtesy of PERL5123DELTA(1perl). go forth and use keys on an array, you absolute legend 🦋💖🌸

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