Perl 5 Porters Weekly: May 6-12, 2013

Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic of the perl5-porters email list. The big news this week is the release of perl-5.18.0-RC1 and RC2.

Topics this week include:

  • perl-5.18.0-RC2 is now available
  • Proposal: initial type annotation in SV
  • What does PERL_HASH_SEED do?
  • Designing an API
  • Should we make hashes return keys in FIFO order?
  • Release timing drift

perl-5.18.0-RC2 is now available

Fire up perlbrew: 5.18.0-RC2 is here. Time to test all your modules against this release candidate! The perldelta also makes great reading - all the stuff that's new and different. Some highlights include the hash ordering changes, experimental lexical subroutines, Unicode 6.2 support, given aliasing global $_ and a metric ton of bug fixes in the /(?{})/ and /(??{})/ regex constructions.

Release announcement

Read perldelta

Download the tarball

Proposal: initial type annotation in SV

Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni wants to record the initial type of an SV to help perl data serializers (Storable, Sereal, JSON::XS, etc) properly encode Perl data structures.

Read the thread

What does PERL_HASH_SEED do?

Just in time for perl-5.18 Yves Orton committed patches to make the environment variable PERL_HASH_SEED (and some new helpers) change the behaviors of hash storage and traversal.

Read the thread

Designing an API

Responding to Nicholas Clark's email pointing out that XS doesn't have a 'real' API, Yves Orton asks, should there be one?

Read the thread

Should we make hashes return keys in FIFO order?

Not quite done with hashing, Yves Orton asks if perl in 5.20 should return keys in FIFO order (i.e., return keys in the order they were inserted.) Some love it, some hate it; standard P5P reaction. :)

Read the thread

Release timing drift

David Golden points out that perl releases seem to be drifting further back in the year than earlier yearly releases. He proposes moving freezes forward a month so blockers can be resolved with less urgency.

Read the thread

About Perl 5 Porters Summaries

user-pic Weekly p5p summaries