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.
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.
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.
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?
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. :)
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.
Weekly p5p summaries