perl5394delta - what is new for perl v5.39.4

- NAME
- DESCRIPTION
- Modules and Pragmata
  - New Modules and Pragmata
  - Updated Modules and Pragmata
- Documentation
  - Changes to Existing Documentation
    - perlre
    - perlapi
- Diagnostics
  - New Diagnostics
    - New Errors
- Testing
- Platform Support
  - Platform-Specific Notes
- Internal Changes
- Selected Bug Fixes
- Acknowledgements
- Reporting Bugs
- Give Thanks
- SEE ALSO

# NAME

perl5394delta - what is new for perl v5.39.4

# DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.39.3 release and the 5.39.4 release.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.39.2, first read perl5393delta, which describes differences between 5.39.2 and 5.39.3.

# Modules and Pragmata

## New Modules and Pragmata

- Term::Table 0.017 has been added to the Perl core.

  This module is a dependency of Test2::Suite.

- Test2::Suite 0.000156 has been added to the Perl core.

  This distribution contains a comprehensive set of test tools for writing unit tests. It is the successor to Test::More and similar modules. Its inclusion in the Perl core means that CPAN module tests can be written using this suite of tools without extra dependencies.

## Updated Modules and Pragmata

- builtin has been upgraded from version 0.010 to 0.011.

  builtin now accepts a version bundle as an input argument, requesting it to import all of the functions that are considered a stable part of the module at the given Perl version. For example:

      use builtin ':5.40';

- feature has been upgraded from version 1.84 to 1.85.

  It now documents the `:all` feature bundle, and suggests a reason why you may not wish to use it.

- File::Find has been upgraded from version 1.43 to 1.44.

- File::stat has been upgraded from version 1.13 to 1.14.

- Math::BigInt has been upgraded from version 1.999839 to 1.999842.

- Math::BigInt::FastCalc has been upgraded from version 0.5014 to 0.5015.

- Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20230920 to 5.20231025.

- perl5db.pl has been upgraded from version 1.77 to 1.78.

  Made parsing of the `l` command arguments saner. [GH #21350]

- POSIX has been upgraded from version 2.15 to 2.16.

  The `mktime` function now works correctly on 32-bit platforms even if the platform's `time_t` type is larger than 32 bits. [GH #21551]

  The `T_SIGNO` and `T_FD` typemap entries have been fixed so they work with any variable name, rather than just the hardcoded `sig` and `fd`.

  The mappings for `Mode_t`, `pid_t`, `Uid_t`, `Gid_t` and `Time_t` have been updated to be integer types; previously they were `NV` floating-point.

- Test::Harness has been upgraded from version 3.47 to 3.48.

- Time::gmtime has been upgraded from version 1.04 to 1.05.

- Time::localtime has been upgraded from version 1.03 to 1.04.

- Time::tm has been upgraded from version 1.00 to 1.01.

- User::grent has been upgraded from version 1.04 to 1.05.

- User::pwent has been upgraded from version 1.02 to 1.03.

- version has been upgraded from version 0.9929 to 0.9930.

- XS::APItest has been upgraded from version 1.33 to 1.34.

- XS::Typemap has been upgraded from version 0.19 to 0.20.

# Documentation

## Changes to Existing Documentation

We have attempted to update the documentation to reflect the changes listed in this document. If you find any we have missed, open an issue at https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues.

Additionally, the following selected changes have been made:

### perlre

- Removed statement suggesting `/p` is a no-op.

### perlapi

- Several internal functions now have documentation - the various `newSUB` functions, `newANONLIST()`, `newANONHASH()`, `newSVREF()` and similar.

# 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.

## New Diagnostics

### New Errors

- Builtin version bundle "%s" is not supported by Perl

  (F) You attempted to `use builtin :ver` for a version number that is either older than 5.39 (when the ability was added), or newer than the current perl version.

- Invalid version bundle "%s"

  (F) A version number that is used to specify an import bundle during a `use builtin ...` statement must be formatted as `:MAJOR.MINOR` with an optional third component, which is ignored. Each component must be a number of 1 to 3 digits. No other characters are permitted. The value that was specified does not conform to these rules.

# Testing

Tests were added and changed to reflect the other additions and changes in this release.

# Platform Support

## Platform-Specific Notes

VMS

  Fixed the configure "installation prefix" prompt to accept a string rather than yes/no.

  Fixed compilation by defining proper value for `perl_lc_all_category_positions_init`.

  Increased buffer size when reading config_H.SH to fix compilation under clang.

# Internal Changes

- `PERL_VERSION_LE` has been fixed to properly check for "less than or equal" rather than "less than".

# Selected Bug Fixes

- Lexical names from the enclosing scope in a lexical sub or closure weren't visible to code executed by calling `eval EXPR;` from the `DB` package. This was introduced in 5.18 in an attempt to prevent subs from retaining a reference to their outer scope, but this broke the special behaviour of `eval EXPR;` in package DB.

  This incidentally fixed a TODO test for `B::Deparse`. [GH #19370]

- Optionally support an argument stack over 2**32 entries on 64-bit platforms. This requires 32GB of memory just for the argument stack pointers itself, so you will require a significantly more memory to take advantage of this.

  To enable this add `-Accflags=-DPERL_STACK_OFFSET_SSIZET` or equivalent to the `Configure` command-line.

  [GH #20917] [GH #21523]

- Fixed various problems with join() where modifications to the separator could be handled inconsistently, or could access released memory. Changes to the separator from magic or overloading for values in the `LIST` no longer have an effect on the resulting joined string. [GH #21458]

- 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]. [GH #21564]

- Many bug fixes have been made for using locales under threads and in embedded perls. And workarounds for libc bugs have been added. As a result thread-safe locale handling is now the default under OpenBSD, and MingW when compiled with UCRT.

  However, testing has shown that Darwin's implementation of thread-safe locale handling has bugs. So now Perl doesn't attempt to use the thread-safe operations when compiled on Darwin.

  As before, you can check to see if your program is running with thread-safe locales by checking if the value of `${^SAFE_LOCALES}` is 1.

- Various bugs have been fixed when perl is configured with `-Accflags=-DNO_LOCALE_NUMERIC` or any other locale category (or categories).

- Not all locale categories need be set to the same locale. Perl now works around bugs in the libc implementations of locale handling on some platforms that previously could result in mojibake.

- `LC_ALL` is represented in one of two ways when not all locale categories are set to the same locale. On some platforms, such as Linux and Windows, the representation is of the form of a series of `'category=locale-name'` pairs. On other platforms, such as *BSD, the representation is positional like `name1 / name2 / ...` . name1 is always for a particular category as defined by the platform, as are the other names. The sequence that separates the names (the `/` above) also varies by platform. Previously, perl had problems with platforms that used the positional notation. This is now fixed.

- A bug has been fixed in the regexp engine with an optimisation that applies to the `+` quantifier where it was followed by a `(*SKIP)` pattern.

  [GH #21534]

# Acknowledgements

Perl 5.39.4 represents approximately 5 weeks of development since Perl 5.39.3 and contains approximately 46,000 lines of changes across 460 files from 20 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 44,000 lines of changes to 390 .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 5.39.4:

Abe Timmerman, Amory Meltzer, Craig A. Berry, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, Dan Jacobson, Elvin Aslanov, Gianni Ceccarelli, Graham Knop, Jake Hamby, James E Keenan, Joe McMahon, Karl Williamson, Leon Timmermans, Lukas Mai, Matthew Horsfall, Paul Evans, Peter John Acklam, Tony Cook, William Lyu, 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.

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 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.

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.

# 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.

# 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.

perl5394delta - what is new for perl v5.39.4