PERL5221DELTA(1perl)

📦
version 5.44.0 · 2 versions
, in arch rolling

💖 NAME 💖

perl5221delta — the whole entire tea on what's new for perl v5.22.1 ✨ (and yeah it lives in the Perl Programmers Reference Guide, that's the manual it's filed under 🫶)

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Okay so bestie, this doc is literally just the receipts on what changed between the 5.22.0 release and the 5.22.1 release. Nothing more, nothing less 💅

If you're upgrading from something older like 5.20.0, pleaseeee go read perl5220delta first — that one spills the differences between 5.20.0 and 5.22.0. Do not skip steps, babe 🙈

🔥 Incompatible Changes 🔥

So there are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.20.0, except for the one single exception below, which the team decided was a totally sensible call to make so that the new "\b{wb}" and (especially) "\b{sb}" features would be sane before people decided they were worthless because of the bugs in their Perl 5.22.0 implementation and just avoided them forever 😭

If any other incompatible changes exist? Those are bugs, periodt. They request that you submit a report. Peep "Reporting Bugs" below 👇

🧚 Bounds Checking Constructs 🧚

Several bugs — including an actual segmentation fault 💀 — have been fixed with the bounds checking constructs that got introduced in Perl 5.22:

  • "\b{gcb}"
  • "\b{sb}"
  • "\b{wb}"
  • "\B{gcb}"
  • "\B{sb}"
  • "\B{wb}"

The way that all the "\B{}" ones now match an empty string, and none of the "\b{}" ones do? Iconic. [GH #14976] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14976>

🎀 Modules and Pragmata 🎀

🌸 Updated Modules and Pragmata 🌸

  • Module::CoreList got upgraded from version 5.20150520 to 5.20151213. glow up ✨
  • PerlIO::scalar got upgraded from version 0.22 to 0.23.
  • POSIX got upgraded from version 1.53 to 1.53_01.
  • Storable got upgraded from version 2.53 to 2.53_01.
  • warnings got upgraded from version 1.32 to 1.34.
  • Win32 got upgraded from version 0.51 to 0.52.
    • This one got updated for Windows 8.1, 10 and 2012 R2 Server. we love to see it 💖

📚 Documentation 📚

💜 Changes to Existing Documentation 💜

perltie

  • The usage of FIRSTKEY and NEXTKEY has been clarified. no more guessing besties 🫶

perlvar

  • The specific true value of $!{E...} is now documented, and they make sure to note that it is subject to change and not guaranteed. so don't get too attached 💀

🩺 Diagnostics 🩺

The following additions or changes have been made to diagnostic output, including warnings and fatal error messages. For the complete list of diagnostic messages, see perldiag.

🔍 Changes to Existing Diagnostics 🔍

  • The printf and sprintf builtins are now more careful about the warnings they emit: argument reordering now disables the "redundant argument" warning in all cases. [GH #14772] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14772>

⚙️ Configuration and Compilation ⚙️

  • Using the NO_HASH_SEED define in combination with the default hash algorithm PERL_HASH_FUNC_ONE_AT_A_TIME_HARD resulted in a fatal error while compiling the interpreter, and this has been the case since Perl 5.17.10 😭 That has been fixed now. slay 💅
  • Configuring with ccflags containing quotes (e.g. -Accflags='-DAPPLLIB_EXP=\"/usr/libperl\"') was broken in Perl 5.22.0 but has now been fixed again. [GH #14732] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14732>

🌈 Platform Support 🌈

🐚 Platform-Specific Notes 🐚

IRIX

  • Under some circumstances IRIX stdio fgetc() and fread() set the errno to ENOENT, which made no sense according to either IRIX or POSIX docs. Errno is now cleared in such cases. [GH #14557] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14557>
  • Problems when multiplying long doubles by infinity have been fixed. [GH #14993] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14993>
  • All tests pass now on IRIX with the default build configuration. we ate that 🍓

🛠️ Selected Bug Fixes 🛠️

okay this is the section where they go off, hold on —

  • qr/(?[ () ])/ no longer segfaults, and instead gives a syntax error message. way better! [GH #14851] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14851>
  • Regular expression possessive quantifier Perl 5.20 regression now fixed. qr/"PAT"{"min,max"}+""/ is supposed to behave identically to qr/(?>"PAT"{"min,max"})/. Since Perl 5.20, this didn't work if min and max were equal. [GH #14857] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14857>
  • Certain syntax errors in "Extended Bracketed Character Classes" in perlrecharclass caused panics instead of the proper error message. This has now been fixed. [GH #15016] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/15016>
  • BEGIN <> no longer segfaults and properly produces an error message. [GH #13546] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/13546>
  • A regression from Perl 5.20 has been fixed, in which some syntax errors in (?[...]) constructs within regular expression patterns could cause a segfault instead of a proper error message. [GH #14933] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14933>
  • Another problem with (?[...]) constructs has been fixed wherein things like \c] could cause panics. [GH #14934] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14934>
  • In Perl 5.22.0, the logic changed when parsing a numeric parameter to the -C option, such that the successfully parsed number was not saved as the option value if it parsed to the end of the argument. [GH #14748] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14748>
  • Warning fatality is now ignored when rewinding the stack. This prevents infinite recursion when the now fatal error also causes rewinding of the stack. [GH #14319] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14319>
  • A crash with %::=(); J->${\"::"} has been fixed. [GH #14790] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14790>
  • Nested quantifiers such as /.{1}??/ should cause perl to throw a fatal error, but were being silently accepted since Perl 5.20.0. This has been fixed. [GH #14960] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14960>
  • Regular expression sequences such as /(?i/ (and similarly with other recognized flags or combination of flags) should cause perl to throw a fatal error, but were being silently accepted since Perl 5.18.0. This has been fixed. [GH #14931] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14931>
  • A bug in hexadecimal floating point literal support meant that high-order bits could be lost in cases where mantissa overflow was caused by too many trailing zeros in the fractional part. This has been fixed. [GH #15032] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/15032>
  • Another hexadecimal floating point bug, causing low-order bits to be lost in cases where the last hexadecimal digit of the mantissa has bits straddling the limit of the number of bits allowed for the mantissa, has also been fixed. [GH #15033] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/15033>
  • Further hexadecimal floating point bugs have been fixed: In some circumstances, the %a format specifier could variously lose the sign of the negative zero, fail to display zeros after the radix point with the requested precision, or even lose the radix point after the leftmost hexadecimal digit completely. ngl that last one is sending me 💀
  • A crash caused by incomplete expressions within /(?[ ])/ (e.g. /(?[[0]+()+])/) has been fixed. [GH #15045] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/15045>

👑 Acknowledgements 👑

Perl 5.22.1 represents approximately 6 months of development since Perl 5.22.0 and contains approximately 19,000 lines of changes across 130 files from 27 authors. the sheer amount of work?? obsessed 😭💖

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 1,700 lines of changes to 44 .pm, .t, .c and .h files.

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 5.22.1:

Aaron Crane, Abigail, Andy Broad, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Chase Whitener, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Daniel Dragan, David Mitchell, Father Chrysostomos, Herbert Breunung, Hugo van der Sanden, James E Keenan, Jan Dubois, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, Lukas Mai, Matthew Horsfall, Peter Martini, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Ricardo Signes, Shlomi Fish, Sisyphus, Steve Hay, Tony Cook, Victor Adam.

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 🫶

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 https://rt.perl.org/ . 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 — this is important bestie, don't dump your whole codebase in there 🙈 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. read that twice 🔥

🦄 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 babes 💖 this was perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17, filed under PERL5221DELTA(1perl) — go forth and upgrade responsibly mwah 💅✨

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