PERL5144DELTA(1perl)

📦
version 5.44.0 · 2 versions
, in arch rolling

💖 NAME 💖

perl5144delta — bestie, this is the whole tea on what's new for perl v5.14.4 ✨ (straight out of the Perl Programmers Reference Guide, 1perl flavor 💅).

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So this doc spills everything that's different between the 5.14.3 release and the 5.14.4 release 🌈.

Heads up tho — if you're jumping up from something way older, like 5.12.0, do yourself a favor and read perl5140delta first 🫶. That one covers the glow-up from 5.12.0 to 5.14.0.

👑 Core Enhancements 👑

Literally nothing changed since 5.14.0. No cap. 🎀

🔥 Security 🔥

Okay so this release is packed: it's got one major, one medium, and a whole pile of minor security fixes 💀. And the minor ones? They're mostly in there so the test suite can pass cleanly with the clang compiler's address sanitizer facility. Slay, but responsibly.

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

So if somebody crafts a very specific set of hash keys — think arguments on a URL — they can make a hash eat a genuinely unhinged amount of memory and CPU, which can possibly get them a Denial-of-Service 😭. That's not a vibe.

This problem has been fixed. ✨

🌸 memory leak in Encode

The UTF-8 encoding implementation in Encode.xs had a memory leak 💧. That leak? Gone.

🌸 [perl #111594] Socket::unpack_sockaddr_un heap-buffer-overflow

A read buffer overflow could pop off while copying "sockaddr" buffers. Fairly harmless, ngl.

This problem has been fixed. 💖

🌸 [perl #111586] SDBM_File: fix off-by-one access to global ".dir"

An extra byte was getting copied for some string literals. Fairly harmless.

This problem has been fixed. 🎀

🌸 off-by-two error in List::Util

A string literal was being used that reached two bytes past the end of the string 🙈. Fairly harmless.

This problem has been fixed. 🦋

🌸 [perl #115994] fix segv in regcomp.c:S_join_exact()

Under debugging builds, while marking optimised-out regex nodes as type "OPTIMIZED", it could start treating blocks of exact text as if they were actual nodes — and thus, SEGV 💀. Fairly harmless.

This problem has been fixed. ⭐

🌸 [perl #115992] PL_eval_start use-after-free

The statement "local $[;", when it's preceded by an "eval", and when it's not part of an assignment — could crash 😭. Fairly harmless.

This problem has been fixed. 🌸

🌸 wrap-around with IO on long strings

Reading or writing strings bigger than 2**31 bytes in size could segfault because of integer wraparound. That's giving chaos energy fr.

This problem has been fixed. 🔥

💜 Incompatible Changes 💜

There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.14.0. And if any exist? They're bugs, and reports are welcome 🙌 (we love a bug report in this house).

🌈 Deprecations 🌈

Zero. None. Nothing has been deprecated since 5.14.0 💅.

🧚 Modules and Pragmata 🧚

💜 New Modules and Pragmata

None.

💜 Updated Modules and Pragmata

These modules got just the minor code fixes listed above in "Security" — and their version numbers have not changed:

  • Socket
  • SDBM_File
  • List::Util

Encode got upgraded from version 2.42_01 to version 2.42_02 🎉.

Module::CoreList has been updated to version 2.49_06 to add data for this release.

💜 Removed Modules and Pragmata

None.

📚 Documentation 📚

💜 New Documentation

None.

💜 Changes to Existing Documentation

None.

🩺 Diagnostics 🩺

No new or changed diagnostics. Nothing to see here 🫶.

🛠 Utility Changes 🛠

None.

⚙️ Configuration and Compilation ⚙️

No changes.

🖥 Platform Support 🖥

💜 New Platforms

None.

💜 Discontinued Platforms

None.

💜 Platform-Specific Notes

  • VMS — 5.14.3 failed to compile on VMS because of an incomplete application of a patch series that allowed "userelocatableinc" and "usesitecustomize" to be used simultaneously 😭. Other platforms were not affected at all, and the problem has now been corrected ✅.

⭐ Selected Bug Fixes ⭐

  • In Perl 5.14.0, "$tainted ~~ @array" stopped working properly 💀. Sometimes it would erroneously fail (when $tainted contained a string that occurs in the array after the first element) or erroneously succeed (when "undef" occurred after the first element) [perl #93590].

🙈 Known Problems 🙈

None. Iconic behavior, honestly 👑.

🫶 Acknowledgements 🫶

Perl 5.14.4 represents approximately 5 months of development since Perl 5.14.3, and it contains approximately 1,700 lines of changes across 49 files from 12 authors 😭🔥.

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 5.14.4:

Andy Dougherty, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Christian Hansen, Craig A. Berry, Dave Rolsky, David Mitchell, Dominic Hargreaves, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, Reini Urban, 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 — and they deserve their flowers 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.

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, don't hand us the whole novel, just the paragraph that breaks, bestie. 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'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, okay? 💅

🌟 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 🎀✨ — this was perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17, and honestly? She ate. Periodt. 💅💖

📦 where this page comes from