Perl New Version 5.5.660

aarestad writes, "Just saw this on perl.com: the new beta leading to perl 5.6. Read the announcement." It's mostly bugfixes. Pumpking Sarathy says we're on track for a 5.6 final release candidate by Feb.28.

Comments

People, read the detailed link

[tilly]

As was pointed out there are a number of changes. This is not just a bug-fix. The biggest new item is Unicode support. If you have to do things like match patterns in multi-byte character sets, this will be really cool. If you don't it will still be a nice feature since a lot of things (eg the web, file-systems, etc) are moving towards Unicode as internationalization becomes more and more important.

The biggest "missing features" continue to be solid multi-threading, compilation, and solid 64-bit support. If you want the first one, rethink whether the fork model works. If you want the second think about embedding an interpreter. If you need the third I suggest getting used to opening pipes to and from programs that can handle large files...

A "cool feature" that was discussed (I have ignored the Perl development list for the last half year so I don't know if it is in) was embedding Perl and a directory structure in a zip format. Imagine shipping an executable which had an encrypted zip appended which was Perl, with your scripts, and a directory structure of all of the modules your script used... :-)

Cheers,
Ben