PERL5181DELTA(1perl)

📦
version 5.44.0 · 2 versions
, in arch rolling

💖 NAME 💖

perl5181delta — what is new for perl v5.18.1 ✨ aka the lil glow-up release notes, bestie

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Okay so this doc is literally just: what changed between the 5.18.0 release and the 5.18.1 release. That's it. That's the whole vibe. 🎀

But heads up — if you're jumping in from something way older, like 5.16.0, do not start here, bestie, that would be chaos. Read perl5180delta first, because that one explains all the differences between 5.16.0 and 5.18.0. Slay in the correct order please. 💅

🚫 Incompatible Changes 🚫

Good news: there are no changes that were intentionally made to break stuff that worked in 5.18.0. Zero. None. ✨

If you do find one, that's not a feature, that's a bug — and the devs would very much like you to submit a report. Peep "Reporting Bugs" down below. 🫶

📦 Modules and Pragmata 📦

🔄 Updated Modules and Pragmata 🔄

  • B got upgraded from 1.42 to 1.42_01 — it fixes bugs related to lexical subroutines. glow up 💖
  • Digest::SHA got upgraded from 5.84 to 5.84_01, fixing a crashing bug. no more crime 😭 [RT #118649]
  • Module::CoreList got upgraded from 2.89 to 2.96. periodt. 👑

🖥️ Platform Support 🖥️

🗺️ Platform-Specific Notes 🗺️

  • AIX — a rarely-encountered configuration bug in the AIX hints file has been corrected. it's giving fixed 💅
  • MidnightBSD — after a patch to the relevant hints file, perl should now build correctly on MidnightBSD 0.4-RELEASE. we love to see it 🌸

🐛 Selected Bug Fixes 🐛

  • Starting in v5.18.0, a construct like /[#](?{})/x would have its # incorrectly interpreted as a comment. The code block would be skipped, unparsed. This has been corrected. not me being a comment when I'm literally code 💀
  • A number of memory leaks related to the new, experimental regexp bracketed character class feature have been plugged. no more drip, only sealed 🫶
  • The OP allocation code now returns correctly aligned memory in all cases for struct pmop. Previously it could return memory only aligned to a 4-byte boundary, which is not correct for an ithreads build with 64 bit IVs on some 32 bit platforms. Notably, this caused the build to fail completely on sparc GNU/Linux. [RT #118055] 😭 that's a whole mood killer
  • The debugger's man command been fixed. It was broken in the v5.18.0 release. The man command is aliased to the names doc and perldoc — all now work again. the trio is back together ✨
  • @_ is now correctly visible in the debugger, fixing a regression introduced in v5.18.0's debugger. [RT #118169] we love a visible @_ 💜
  • Fixed a small number of regexp constructions that could either fail to match or crash perl when the string being matched against was allocated above the 2GB line on 32-bit systems. [RT #118175] 😵
  • Perl v5.16 inadvertently introduced a bug whereby calls to XSUBs that were not visible at compile time were treated as lvalues and could be assigned to, even when the subroutine was not an lvalue sub. This has been fixed. [perl #117947] not the accidental lvalue era 🚫
  • Perl v5.18 inadvertently introduced a bug whereby dual-vars (i.e. variables with both string and numeric values, such as $!) where the truthness of the variable was determined by the numeric value rather than the string value. [RT #118159] lowkey unhinged behavior, glad it's gone 🙈
  • Perl v5.18 inadvertently introduced a bug whereby interpolating mixed up- and down-graded UTF-8 strings in a regex could result in malformed UTF-8 in the pattern: specifically if a downgraded character in the range "\x80..\xff" followed a UTF-8 string, e.g.
utf8::upgrade(  my $u = "\x{e5}");
utf8::downgrade(my $d = "\x{e5}");
/$u$d/

[perl #118297]. 💜

  • Lexical constants (my sub a() { 42 }) no longer crash when inlined. iconic, honestly 🌈
  • Parameter prototypes attached to lexical subroutines are now respected when compiling sub calls without parentheses. Previously, the prototypes were honoured only for calls with parentheses. [RT #116735] 🎀
  • Syntax errors in lexical subroutines in combination with calls to the same subroutines no longer cause crashes at compile time. phew 😮‍💨
  • The dtrace sub-entry probe now works with lexical subs, instead of crashing [perl #118305]. probe said slay 💫
  • Undefining an inlinable lexical subroutine (my sub foo() { 42 } undef &foo) would result in a crash if warnings were turned on. scary!! fixed. 💀
  • Deep recursion warnings no longer crash lexical subroutines. [RT #118521] 🫶

👑 Acknowledgements 👑

Perl 5.18.1 represents approximately 2 months of development since Perl 5.18.0 and contains approximately 8,400 lines of changes across 60 files from 12 authors. that's the whole group project and everyone ate 🔥

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 5.18.1:

Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, David Mitchell, Father Chrysostomos, Karl Williamson, Lukas Mai, Nicholas Clark, Peter Martini, Ricardo Signes, Shlomi Fish, Tony Cook.

12 icons fr fr 💅

The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is 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 the real MVPs and we see you 🫶)

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish. 🌸

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. go 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. 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. tiny test case = the whole assignment, do not skip 📝

⚠️ 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. 🔒 seriously, that address is for core security only, iykyk

👀 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. ⚖️

mwah, that's the whole page, bestie 💖 this was pulled from the Perl Programmers Reference Guide, documented for perl v5.44.0 and dated 2026-10-17, filed under PERL5181DELTA(1perl). go forth and upgrade responsibly 🦋✨

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