Good news! I got all our patches updated for perl 5.36.0. To skip the summary of new features, jump down to the bottom for details on how you can help test it.
I missed 5.34 due to non-computer projects that got in the way, but that means this update has twice the cool newness. Skip to the end for details about getting the patched version and testing it out. There wasn't a whole lot in perl 5.34, mostly p5p worked on changes to the governance model. They also came up with an RFC process to try to overcome some of the bikeshedding that the perl community has turned into an art form. The one big new feature in 5.34 was experimental try/catch support, but you can read all about it in the 5.34 perldelta. https://metacpan.org/release/XSAWYERX/perl-5.34.0/view/pod/perldelta.pod On the other hand, that RFC process and the new governance model unblocked a bunch of changes, the most anticipated being that the long experimental signatures are now considered stable, with the one caveat that using @_ inside a signatured sub is still experimental. In addition, we're up to Unicode 14, which means I'll be sending in an update to en_US.UTF-8.src before long. Another really nice new feature is that it's now possible to tell that a value is a "boolean". That is, `!!1` is a magic "true" value and `!!0` is magic false (other boolean things like `1 == 1` also return these booleans). There are new functions that can use these values to find out if a value is not only "truthy" or "falsy", but whether it is one of these booleans. The primary use for this is in serializers like JSON that can now output these values as true and false. The feature that I'm most excited for, and probably what will make me `use v5.36` in my scripts is multi-value iteration. Examples from the docs: for my ($key, $value) (%hash) { ... } for my ($left, $right, $gripping) (@moties) { ... } Another solution to the bikeshedding led to a lot of new built-ins, which live in a new "builtin" namespace for functions. While you can import these like any other, they are always available as `builtin::function()`. This allowed implementing a lot of new functions, like builtin::trim to strip leading and trailing whitespace from a string "correctly". The discussion of that was amusing with several examples with "I just do $this", with the reply of "the bug in that way is $explanation". A few of the other builtins, like indexed, true, false, and is_bool go along with the earlier features like multi-for and stable booleans. Several things just led to more optimized and easier to access implementations of things that shipped with perl in other modules already like blessed, weaken, refaddr, and reftype. This isn't the full list, so go read the details in the delta. The final big new feature, which presents and is documented as two features are the experimental defer and finally (for the new try/catch) blocks. They both run code at the end of a scope, although for different reasons. Read the whole delta for a better explanation of these new things as well as other improvements and new modules. https://metacpan.org/release/RJBS/perl-5.36.0/view/pod/perldelta.pod I did additionally pull in the latest version of Compress::Raw::Zlib that uses the upstream fix for the recent zlib CVE, although we still link perl against system zlib. The upgrade also allows the tests for that module to pass with the system zlib on my macppc. You can see full test results for the architectures I have on Github https://github.com/afresh1/OpenBSD-perl/tree/blead/build_logs/5.36.0 If you have an architecture that I don't, or just want to try out the new perl, there are instructions in the README in that repository. https://github.com/afresh1/OpenBSD-perl download the patches and scripts https://github.com/afresh1/OpenBSD-perl/archive/blead.tar.gz and extract someplace or git clone https://github.com/afresh1/OpenBSD-perl.git download perl-5.36.0.tar.gz into the same directory https://cpan.metacpan.org/authors/id/R/RJ/RJBS/perl-5.36.0.tar.gz cd to someplace you have room run /path/to/OpenBSD-perl/build_perl wait send me the log file(s) it generates If it was successful, you can also follow the instructions at the end to use `make -f Makefile.bsd-wrwapper install` to install it as your system perl, although that may cause issues with any XS code that you don't compile yourself, such as those in packages. There are also some files that have been removed, if you've installed the new perl: rm -rf /usr/lib/libperl.so.22.0 \ /usr/libdata/perl5/*/CORE/stadtx_hash.h \ /usr/libdata/perl5/pod/perldos.pod \ /usr/libdata/perl5/pod/perlmacos.pod \ /usr/libdata/perl5/pod/perlnetware.pod \ /usr/libdata/perl5/pod/perlsymbian.pod \ /usr/libdata/perl5/unicore/To/Digit.pl \ /usr/libdata/perl5/unicore/To/Fold.pl \ /usr/libdata/perl5/unicore/To/Lower.pl \ /usr/libdata/perl5/unicore/To/Title.pl \ /usr/libdata/perl5/unicore/To/Upper.pl \ /usr/libdata/perl5/unicore/lib/InSC/Consona9.pl I'll next be working on testing some port updates with the new perl, and making sure I can import it properly. You can download a pre-patched version of perl that could replace /usr/src/gnu/usr.bin/perl if you want to build a release with perl 5.36.0. https://cvs.afresh1.com/~andrew/perl-update/OpenBSD-perl-5.36.0.tar.gz I look forward to seeing test reports. -- andrew
