PERL5383DELTA(1perl)

📦

version 5.44.0 · 2 versions

5.44.0 · arch rolling (latest)
5.42.3 · arch rolling

💖 PERL5383DELTA 💖

okay bestie, you're looking at PERL5383DELTA(1perl) — part of the Perl Programmers Reference Guide, and it's giving release-notes-chronicles energy. pull up a chair 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

perl5383delta — literally telling you what's new for perl v5.38.3 🌸

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

This doc spills the tea on the differences between the 5.38.2 release and the 5.38.3 release. no cap.

If you're upgrading from something earlier like 5.38.1, do the responsible thing and read perl5382delta first — that one covers the glow-up from 5.38.1 to 5.38.2. one step at a time, queen 👑

💅 Incompatible Changes 💅

There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.38.2. like, zero. if any exist, they're straight up bugs and we need you to report them. check out "Reporting Bugs" down below for the deets.

🎀 Modules and Pragmata 🎀

🌟 Updated Modules and Pragmata 🌟

DynaLoader has been upgraded from version 1.54 to 1.54_01.

This fixes an error when building Perl on OS X 10.3. [GH #21751 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/21751]

Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20231129 to 5.20250118_38.

📚 Documentation 📚

🧚 Changes to Existing Documentation 🧚

We have attempted to update the documentation to reflect the changes listed in this document. if you spot any we missed, open an issue at https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues. we're not mad, we're just disappointed 🙈 (jk, we'd love the heads up)

🔥 Testing 🔥

Tests were added and changed to reflect the other additions and changes in this release. the test suite said "slay" and honestly, same.

💀 Selected Bug Fixes 💀

"use 5.36;" or later didn't enable the post parse reporting of Name "%s::%s" used only once: possible typo warnings when enabling warnings. [GH #21271 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/21271]
Fixed a crash or assertion when cleaning up a closure that refers to an outside "our" sub. [GH #21067 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/21067]
Don't clear the integer flag "IOK" from lines in the "@{"_<$sourcefile"}" array when a "dbstate" op is removed for that line. This was broken when fixing [GH #19198 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/19198]. [GH #21564 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/21564]
Fixed an issue where utf8n_to_uvchr() failed to correctly identify certain invalid UTF-8 sequences as invalid. Specifically, sequences that start with continuation bytes or unassigned bytes could cause unexpected behaviour or a panic. This fix ensures that such invalid sequences are now properly detected and handled. This correction also resolves related issues in modules that handle UTF-8 processing, such as Encode.
Builds with "-msse" and quadmath on 32-bit x86 systems would crash with a misaligned access early in the build. [GH #22577 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/22577]
Fixed a bug introduced in Perl 5.34 whereby uninitialized data in the underlying array of an AV after it has been unshifted and resized could lead to segmentation faults or other errors depending on the data. [GH #21235 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/21235]
Fixed an issue where Perl sometimes failed to correctly toggle into a dot radix locale. [GH #21746 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/21746] [GH #22176 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/22176]
Stopped certain syntax errors from provoking core dumps due to a double free of an OP. [GH #21724 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/21724]
Fixed a double free error or possible memory leak when failing to compile certain regexps. [GH #21661 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/21661]
Fixed the initialization of Perl's querylocale() emulation so that the locale is set correctly if the environment specifies a non-C locale. [GH #21366 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/21366]

👑 Acknowledgements 👑

Perl 5.38.3 represents approximately 14 months of development since Perl 5.38.2 and contains approximately 5,600 lines of changes across 62 files from 22 authors. that's a whole era, honestly.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 2,600 lines of changes to 20 .pm, .t, .c and .h files.

Perl continues to flourish into its fourth decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.38.3:

Anton Voloshin, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, E. Choroba, Elvin Aslanov, Graham Knop, James E Keenan, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, Lukas Mai, Masahiro Honma, Matthew Horsfall, Max Maischein, Paul Evans, Philippe Bruhat (BooK), Renee Baecker, Ricardo Signes, Richard Leach, Steve Hay, Thibault Duponchelle, Tony Cook, Yves Orton.

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. we see you, we love 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. periodt.

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 perl bug database at https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues. There may also be information at http://www.perl.org/, the Perl Home Page.

If you believe you have an unreported bug, please open an issue at https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. tiny but mighty, that's the vibe ✨

If the bug you are reporting has security implications which make it inappropriate to send to a public issue tracker, then see "SECURITY VULNERABILITY CONTACT INFORMATION" in perlsec for details of how to report the issue. please don't post that one publicly, bestie 😭

🌈 Give Thanks 🌈

If you wish to thank the Perl 5 Porters for the work we had done in Perl 5, you can do so by running the perlthanks program:

perlthanks

This will send an email to the Perl 5 Porters list with your show of thanks. wholesome behaviour, highly recommend 💜

👀 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 came to you from perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17, and it's the PERL5383DELTA(1perl) manual — go forth and upgrade, you absolute icon 👑🌸

📦 where this page comes from

arch rolling: perl 5.44.0-1 · Artistic-1.0-Perl AND GPL-1.0-or-later
💖 girlified by deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash on 2026-11-03: a language model's rewrite of the original, under its terms