PERL589DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL589DELTA(1)NAME
perldelta - what is new for perl v5.8.9
DESCRIPTION
This document describes differences between the 5.8.8 release and the
5.8.9 release.
Incompatible Changes
There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.8.
Core EnhancementsModules and PragmataUtility ChangesNew DocumentationPerformance Enhancements
· The default since perl 5.000 has been for perl to create an empty
scalar with every new typeglob. The increased use of lexical vari‐
ables means that most are now unused. Thanks to Nicholas Clark's
efforts, Perl can now be compiled with "-DPERL_DONT_CREATE_GVSV" to
avoid creating these empty scalars. This will significantly
decrease the number of scalars allocated for all configurations,
and the number of scalars that need to be copied for ithread cre‐
ation. Whilst this option is binary compatible with existing perl
installations, it does change a long-standing assumption about the
internals, hence it is not enabled by default, as some third party
code may rely on the old behaviour.
We would recommend testing with this configuration on new deploy‐
ments of perl, particularly for multi-threaded servers, to see
whether all third party code is compatible with it, as this config‐
uration may give useful performance improvements. For existing
installations we would not recommend changing to this configuration
unless thorough testing is performed before deployment.
Installation and Configuration ImprovementsSelected Bug FixesNew or Changed DiagnosticsChanged InternalsNew TestsKnown ProblemsPlatform Specific ProblemsReporting 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 pro‐
gram 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/
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.
perl v5.8.8 2008-09-19 PERL589DELTA(1)