Initial work for pod/erldelta for 5.23.5

[perl5.git] / pod / perl5234delta.pod

=encoding utf8

=head1 NAME

perl5234delta - what is new for perl v5.23.4

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.23.3 release and the 5.23.4
release.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.23.2, first read
L<perl5233delta>, which describes differences between 5.23.2 and 5.23.3.

=head1 Incompatible Changes

=head2 Lexical $_ has been removed

C<my $_> was introduced in Perl 5.10, and subsequently caused much confusion
with no obvious solution.  In Perl 5.18.0, it was made experimental on the
theory that it would either be removed or redesigned in a less confusing (but
backward-incompatible) way.  Over the following years, no alternatives were
proposed.  The feature has now been removed and will fail to compile.

=head2 Only blanks and tabs are now allowed within C<[...]> within C<(?[...])>.

The experimental Extended Bracketed Character Classes can contain regular
bracketed character classes within them.  These differ from regular ones in
that white space is generally ignored, unless escaped by preceding it with a
backslash.  The white space that is ignored is now limited to just tab C<\t>
and SPACE characters.  Previously, it was any white space.  See
L<perlrecharclass/Extended Bracketed Character Classes>.

=head1 Performance Enhancements

=over 4

=item *

C</fixed-substr/> has been made much faster.

On platforms with a libc memchr() implementation which makes good use of
underlying hardware support, patterns which include fixed substrings will now
often be much faster; for example with glibc on a recent x86_64 CPU, this:

    $s = "a" x 1000 . "wxyz";
    $s =~ /wxyz/ for 1..30000

is now about 7 times faster.  On systems with slow memchr(), e.g. 32-bit ARM
Raspberry Pi, there will be a small or little speedup.  Conversely, some
pathological cases, such as C<"ab" x 1000 =~ /aa/> will be slower now; up to 3
times slower on the rPi, 1.5x slower on x86_64.

=back

=head1 Modules and Pragmata

=head2 Updated Modules and Pragmata

=over 4

=item *

L<B> has been upgraded from version 1.59 to 1.60.

=item *

L<bignum> has been upgraded from version 0.40 to 0.41.

=item *

L<Compress::Raw::Bzip2> has been upgraded from version 2.068 to 2.069.

=item *

L<Compress::Raw::Zlib> has been upgraded from version 2.068_01 to 2.069.

=item *

L<Devel::PPPort> has been upgraded from version 3.31 to 3.32.

=item *

L<DynaLoader> has been upgraded from version 1.34 to 1.35.

=item *

L<Encode> has been upgraded from version 2.77 to 2.78.

=item *

L<experimental> has been upgraded from version 0.014 to 0.016.

=item *

L<ExtUtils::CBuilder> has been upgraded from version 0.280223 to 0.280224.

=item *

L<File::Path> has been upgraded from version 2.11 to 2.12.

=item *

L<if> has been upgraded from version 0.0605 to 0.0606.

=item *

L<IO> has been upgraded from version 1.35 to 1.36.

For an IO::Poll object C<$poll> with no file handles yet in it,
C<$poll-E<gt>poll(10)> now sleeps for up to 10 seconds anyway instead of
returning 0 immediately.
L<[cpan #25049]|https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=25049>

=item *

The IO-Compress modules have been upgraded from version 2.068 to 2.069.

=item *

L<Math::BigInt> has been upgraded from version 1.999701 to 1.999704.

=item *

L<Math::BigInt::FastCalc> has been upgraded from version 0.31 to 0.34.

=item *

L<Module::CoreList> has been upgraded from version 5.20150920 to 5.20151020.

=item *

L<Module::Metadata> has been upgraded from version 1.000027 to 1.000029.

=item *

L<Perl::OSType> has been upgraded from version 1.008 to 1.009.

=item *

L<PerlIO::encoding> has been upgraded from version 0.21 to 0.22.

PerlIO::encoding objects are now properly duplicated.
L<[perl #31923]|https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=31923>

=item *

L<POSIX> has been upgraded from version 1.57 to 1.58.

If C<POSIX::strerror> was passed C<$!> as its argument then it accidentally
cleared C<$!>.  This has been fixed.
L<[perl #126229]|https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126229>

=item *

L<Socket> has been upgraded from version 2.020_01 to 2.020_02.

Various fixes have been applied to inet_pton for the benefit of MS VC++ builds
on Windows.  In particular, this restores the build with MS VC++ 6.0.

=item *

L<Unicode::Normalize> has been upgraded from version 1.19 to 1.21.

=item *

L<warnings> has been upgraded from version 1.33 to 1.35.

The C<warnings::enabled> example now actually uses C<warnings::enabled>.
L<[perl #126051]|https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126051>

=back

=head1 Documentation

=head2 Changes to Existing Documentation

=head3 L<perlapi>

=over 4

=item *

The process of using undocumented globals has been documented, namely, that one
should send email to L<perl5-porters@perl.org|mailto:perl5-porters@perl.org>
first to get the go-ahead for documenting and using an undocumented function or
global variable.

=back

=head3 L<perlsub>

=over 4

=item *

Updated to note that anonymous subroutines can have signatures.

=back

=head3 L<perltie>

=over 4

=item *

The usage of C<FIRSTKEY> and C<NEXTKEY> has been clarified.

=back

=head3 L<perlvar>

=over 4

=item *

The specific true value of C<$!{E...}> is now documented, noting that it is
subject to change and not guaranteed.

=back

=head1 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 L<perldiag>.

=head2 New Diagnostics

=head3 New Errors

=over 4

=item *

L<Can't find Unicode property definition "%s" in regex;|perldiag/"Can't find Unicode property definition "%s" in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/">

=item *

L<Character following \p must be '{' or a single-character Unicode property name in regex;|perldiag/"Character following \%c must be '{' or a single-character Unicode property name in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/">

=item *

L<Illegal user-defined property name|perldiag/"Illegal user-defined property name">

=back

=head2 Changes to Existing Diagnostics

=over 4

=item *

L<Can't modify non-lvalue subroutine call of &%s|perldiag/"Can't modify non-lvalue subroutine call of &%s">

This error now reports the name of the non-lvalue subroutine you attempted to
use as an lvalue.

=back

=head1 Configuration and Compilation

=over 4

=item *

Using the C<NO_HASH_SEED> define in combination with the default hash algorithm
C<PERL_HASH_FUNC_ONE_AT_A_TIME_HARD> resulted in a fatal error while compiling
the interpreter, since Perl 5.17.10.  This has been fixed.

=item *

If you had F<Configure> hints for C<d_procselfexe> or C<procselfexe>, they were
probably broken by the AmigaOS changes in Perl 5.23.3.  This has been now
fixed.
L<[perl #126152]|https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126152>

=back

=head1 Platform Support

=head2 Platform-Specific Notes

=over 4

=item IRIX

=over

=item *

Under some circumstances IRIX stdio fgetc() and fread() set the errno to
C<ENOENT>, which made no sense according to either IRIX or POSIX docs.  Errno
is now cleared in such cases.
L<[perl #123977]|https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123977>

=item *

Problems when multiplying long doubles by infinity have been fixed.
L<[perl #126396]|https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126396>

=back

=item MacOS X

=over

=item *

Until now OS X builds of perl have specified a link target of 10.3 (Panther,
2003) but have not specified a compiler target.  From now on, builds of perl on
OS X 10.6 or later (Snow Leopard, 2008) by default capture the current OS X
version and specify that as the explicit build target in both compiler and
linker flags, thus preserving binary compatibility for extensions built later
regardless of changes in OS X, SDK, or compiler and linker versions.  To
override the default value used in the build and preserved in the flags,
specify C<export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.N> before configuring and building
perl, where 10.N is the version of OS X you wish to target.  In OS X 10.5 or
earlier there is no change to the behavior present when those systems were
current; the link target is still OS X 10.3 and there is no explicit compiler
target.

=back

=item VMS

=over

=item *

Perl now implements its own C<killpg> by scanning for processes in the
specified process group, which may not mean exactly the same thing as a Unix
process group, but allows us to send a signal to a parent (or master) process
and all of its sub-processes.  At the perl level, this means we can now send a
negative pid like so:

    kill SIGKILL, -$pid;

to signal all processes in the same group as C<$pid>.

=back

=item Win32

=over

=item *

A new build option C<USE_NO_REGISTRY> has been added to the makefiles.  This
option is off by default, meaning the default is to do Windows registry
lookups.  This option stops Perl from looking inside the registry for anything.
For what values are looked up in the registry see L<perlwin32>.  Internally, in
C, the name of this option is C<WIN32_NO_REGISTRY>.

=item *

The behavior of Perl using C<HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Perl> and
C<HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Perl> to lookup certain values, including C<%ENV>
vars starting with C<PERL> has changed.  Previously, the 2 keys were checked
for entries at all times through Perl processes life time even if they did not
exist.  For performance reasons, now, if the root key (i.e.
C<HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Perl> or C<HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Perl>) does
not exist at process start time, it will not be checked again for C<%ENV>
override entries for the remainder of the Perl processes life.  This more
closely matches Unix behaviour in that the environment is copied or inherited
on startup and changing the variable in the parent process or another process
or editing F<.bashrc> will not change the environmental variable in other
existing, running, processes.

=item *

One glob fetch was removed for each C<-X> or C<stat> call whether done from
Perl code or internally from Perl's C code.  The glob being looked up was
C<${^WIN32_SLOPPY_STAT}> which is a special variable.  This makes C<-X> and
C<stat> slightly faster.

=item *

During miniperl's process startup, during the build process, 4 to 8 IO calls
related to the process starting F<.pl> and the F<buildcustomize.pl> file were
removed from the code opening and executing the first 1 or 2 F<.pl> files.

=back

=back

=head1 Internal Changes

=over 4

=item *

L<perlapi/sv_backoff> had its return type changed from C<int> to C<void>.  It
previously has always returned C<0> since Perl 5.000 stable but that was
undocumented.  Although C<sv_backoff> is marked as public API, XS code is not
expected to be impacted since the proper API call would be through public API
C<sv_setsv(sv, &PL_sv_undef)>, or quasi-public C<SvOOK_off>, or non-public
C<SvOK_off> calls, and the return value of C<sv_backoff> was previously a
meaningless constant that can be rewritten as C<(sv_backoff(sv),0)>.

=item *

The C<EXTEND> and C<MEXTEND> macros have been improved to avoid various issues
with integer truncation and wrapping.  In particular, some casts formerly used
within the macros have been removed.  This means for example that passing an
unsigned nitems argument is likely to raise a compiler warning now (it's always
been documented to require a signed value; formerly int, lately SSize_t).

=back

=head1 Selected Bug Fixes

=over 4

=item *

There were places in regular expression patterns where comments (C<(?#...)>)
weren't allowed, but should have been.  This is now fixed.
L<[perl #116639]|https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=116639>

=item *

Some regressions from Perl 5.20 have been fixed, in which some syntax errors in
L<C<(?[...])>|perlrecharclass/Extended Bracketed Character Classes> constructs
within regular expression patterns could cause a segfault instead of a proper
error message.
L<[perl #126180]|https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126180>
L<[perl #126404]|https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126404>

=item *

Another problem with
L<C<(?[...])>|perlrecharclass/Extended Bracketed Character Classes>
constructs has been fixed wherein things like C<\c]> could cause panics.
L<[perl #126181]|https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126181>

=item *

Some problems with attempting to extend the perl stack to around 2G or 4G
entries have been fixed.  This was particularly an issue on 32-bit perls built
to use 64-bit integers, and was easily noticeable with the list repetition
operator, e.g.

    @a = (1) x $big_number

Formerly perl may have crashed, depending on the exact value of C<$big_number>;
now it will typically raise an exception.
L<[perl #125937]|https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=125937>

=item *

In a regex conditional expression C<(?(condition)yes-pattern|no-pattern)>, if
the condition is C<(?!)> then perl failed the match outright instead of
matching the no-pattern.  This has been fixed.
L<[perl #126222]|https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126222>

=item *

The special backtracking control verbs C<(*VERB:ARG)> now all allow an optional
argument and set C<REGERROR>/C<REGMARK> appropriately as well.
L<[perl #126186]|https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126186>

=item *

Several bugs, including a segmentation fault, have been fixed with the bounds
checking constructs (introduced in Perl 5.22) C<\b{gcb}>, C<\b{sb}>, C<\b{wb}>,
C<\B{gcb}>, C<\B{sb}>, and C<\B{wb}>.  All the C<\B{}> ones now match an empty
string; none of the C<\b{}> ones do.
L<[perl #126319]|https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126319>

=back

=head1 Errata From Previous Releases

=over 4

=item *

(This was actually done in Perl 5.23.2, but the perldelta entry got missed.)
The way that C<OP_AASSIGN> handles assignment with potentially common values
(e.g. C<($a,$b) = ($b, $a)> has changed.  In particular the C<OPpASSIGN_COMMON>
flag has been replaced with three more specific flags:

    OPpASSIGN_COMMON_AGG
    OPpASSIGN_COMMON_RC1
    OPpASSIGN_COMMON_SCALAR

and the runtime now sometimes does a mark and sweep using the C<SVf_BREAK> to
detect common elements.

=back

=head1 Acknowledgements

Perl 5.23.4 represents approximately 4 weeks of development since Perl 5.23.3
and contains approximately 21,000 lines of changes across 360 files from 21
authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were
approximately 15,000 lines of changes to 250 .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 5.23.4:

Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, Daniel
Dragan, David Mitchell, Doug Bell, Father Chrysostomos, H.Merijn Brand, Jarkko
Hietaniemi, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, Nicholas Clark, Peter Martini,
Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes, Steve Hay, Tony Cook, Victor
Adam, Vincent Pit, 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 F<AUTHORS> file in the Perl source distribution.

=head1 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
L<https://rt.perl.org/> .  There may also be information at
L<http://www.perl.org/> , the Perl Home Page.

If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the L<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 C<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.

=head1 SEE ALSO

The F<Changes> file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details on
what changed.

The F<INSTALL> file for how to build Perl.

The F<README> file for general stuff.

The F<Artistic> and F<Copying> files for copyright information.

=cut