PERL583DELTA(1perl)

📦
version 5.44.0 · 2 versions
, in arch rolling

💖 perl583delta — what's new for perl v5.8.3 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because this is the Perl Programmers Reference Guide drop for perl583delta, and it's literally just the tea on what changed between 5.8.2 and 5.8.3. 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

perl583delta — what is new for perl v5.8.3 🎀

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

This doc spills the differences between the 5.8.2 release and the 5.8.3 release. no cap.

If you're upgrading from something way older, like 5.6.1, bestie you gotta do your homework first: read perl58delta first, because it covers the differences between 5.6.0 and 5.8.0. then read perl581delta and perl582delta, which cover the differences between 5.8.0, 5.8.1 and 5.8.2. it's giving required reading, fr fr. 📚

💀 Incompatible Changes 💀

There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.2.

periodt. nothing broke. we love a clean upgrade arc. 👑

🦋 Core Enhancements 🦋

A "SCALAR" method is now available for tied hashes. this gets called when a tied hash is used in scalar context, like this:

if (%tied_hash) {
    ...
}

The old behaviour was that %tied_hash would return whatever would have been returned for that hash before the hash was tied (so usually 0). The new behaviour, in the absence of a SCALAR method, is to return TRUE if you're in the middle of an "each" iteration, and otherwise call FIRSTKEY to check if the hash is empty (making sure that a subsequent "each" will also begin by calling FIRSTKEY). Please see "SCALAR" in perltie for the full details and caveats. 💅

🧚 Modules and Pragmata 🧚

These all got some love:

  • CGI
  • Cwd
  • Digest
  • Digest::MD5
  • Encode
  • File::Spec
  • FindBin — a function "again" is provided to resolve problems where modules in different directories wish to use FindBin. iconic.
  • List::Util — you can now weaken references to read only values. 🔥
  • Math::BigInt
  • PodParser
  • Pod::Perldoc
  • POSIX
  • Unicode::Collate
  • Unicode::Normalize
  • Test::Harness
  • threads::shared — "cond_wait" has a new two argument form. "cond_timedwait" has been added. ✨

🛠️ Utility Changes 🛠️

"find2perl" now assumes -print as a default action. Previously, it needed to be specified explicitly. so casual of it before, honestly.

A new utility, "prove", makes it easy to run an individual regression test at the command line. "prove" is part of Test::Harness, which users of earlier Perl versions can install from CPAN. main character utility energy. 👑

📖 New Documentation 📖

The documentation has been revised in places to produce more standard manpages.

The documentation for the special code blocks (BEGIN, CHECK, INIT, END) has been improved. bless. 🥹

🏗️ Installation and Configuration Improvements 🏗️

Perl now builds on OpenVMS I64. slay. 🌈

🐛 Selected Bug Fixes 🐛

  • Using substr() on a UTF8 string could cause subsequent accesses on that string to return garbage. This was due to incorrect UTF8 offsets being cached, and is now fixed. 💀➡️💖
  • join() could return garbage when the same join() statement was used to process 8 bit data having earlier processed UTF8 data, due to the flags on that statement's temporary workspace not being reset correctly. This is now fixed.
  • "$a .. $b" will now work as expected when either $a or $b is "undef". 🙈
  • Using Unicode keys with tied hashes should now work correctly.
  • Reading $^E now preserves $!. Previously, the C code implementing $^E did not preserve "errno", so reading $^E could cause "errno" and therefore $! to change unexpectedly.
  • Reentrant functions will (once more) work with C++. 5.8.2 introduced a bugfix which accidentally broke the compilation of Perl extensions written in C++. oops, my bad era. 😭

🚨 New or Changed Diagnostics 🚨

The fatal error "DESTROY created new reference to dead object" is now documented in perldiag. spooky name, now with receipts. 👻

🔧 Changed Internals 🔧

The hash code has been refactored to reduce source duplication. The external interface is unchanged, and aside from the bug fixes described above, there should be no change in behaviour. so you can stay unbothered. 💅

"hv_clear_placeholders" is now part of the perl API. ✨

Some C macros have been tidied. In particular macros which create temporary local variables now name these variables more defensively, which should avoid bugs where names clash.

<signal.h> is now always included. (we stay including it, periodt.)

⚙️ Configuration and Building ⚙️

"Configure" now invokes callbacks regardless of the value of the variable they are called for. Previously callbacks were only invoked in the "case $variable $define)" branch. This change should only affect platform maintainers writing configuration hints files. niche audience, still slay. 🎀

💻 Platform Specific Problems 💻

The regression test ext/threads/shared/t/wait.t fails on early RedHat 9 and HP-UX 10.20 due to bugs in their threading implementations. RedHat users should see https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2003-136.html and consider upgrading their glibc. not us, it's them. 🫠

heads up bestie: that failing test is a them problem, not a Perl problem. literally their threading. 😭

😬 Known Problems 😬

Detached threads aren't supported on Windows yet, as they may lead to memory access violation problems.

There is a known race condition opening scripts in "suidperl". "suidperl" is neither built nor installed by default, and has been deprecated since perl 5.8.0. You are advised to replace use of suidperl with tools such as sudo ( http://www.courtesan.com/sudo/ )

⚠️ okay this one is genuinely important: suidperl is deprecated, not built by default, not installed by default, and has a known race condition when opening scripts. swap it out for sudo or friends. do not play with this one. 🙅

We have a backlog of unresolved bugs. Dealing with bugs and bug reports is unglamorous work; not something ideally suited to volunteer labour, but that is all that we have. 💀

The perl5 development team are implementing changes to help address this problem, which should go live in early 2004.

🔮 Future Directions 🔮

Code freeze for the next maintenance release (5.8.4) is on March 31st 2004, with release expected by mid April. Similarly 5.8.5's freeze will be at the end of June, with release by mid July. putting it on the calendar fr fr. 📅

🕊️ Obituary 🕊️

Iain 'Spoon' Truskett, Perl hacker, author of perlreref and contributor to CPAN, died suddenly on 29th December 2003, aged 24. He will be missed.

💜 rest in peace, Spoon. thank you for everything you gave this community.

🐞 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://bugs.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. 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. You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs at http://bugs.perl.org/

bestie, "tiny but sufficient test case" is the whole assignment. nobody can debug 400 lines of vibes. give them the small one. 🫶

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

  • The Changes file for 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 tea, bestie 💖 this was perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17 — go forth, upgrade responsibly, and remember: suidperl is not the move. 🎀✨💅

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