Perl v5.20 - what you need to know

May 27, 2014 by David Farrell

With a new version of Perl expected to land this week, we’ve pulled together a summary of the headline changes for Perl v5.20. Enjoy!

Subroutine signatures

This is the big one. It’s hard to understate how great this is. No more ugly assignment code - with 5.20 you can write:

use feature 'signatures';

sub echo_chamber ($sound) {
    return $sound;
}

We first covered them back in February, and Ovid blogged about them too. More recently we benchmarked them.

Postfix dereferencing

The next cool new feature is postfix dereferencing. Hard to describe but easy to show:

use experimental 'postderef';

my $nested_array_ref = [[[[[1,2,3]]]]];

# circumfix dereference - usual way
push @{$nested_array_ref->[0]->[0]->[0]->[0]}, 4;

# postfix dereference - new way
push $nested_array_ref->[0]->[0]->[0]->[0]->@*, 5;

We previously detailed the benefits of postfix dereferencing.

Hash slices

Perl 5.20 delivers a new slice type: hash slices. These work in a similar way to the array slice, except the “sliced” data provides full key value pairs instead of just the values as with an array slice.

my %raindrops = ( splish => 4, splash => 9, splosh => 7 );
my %hash_slice = %raindrops{ 'splish', 'splosh'};
# hash_slice is (splish => 4, splosh => 7)

What’s even more cool, if you use a hash slice on an array, the resulting hash has the array index elements as the keys:

my @raindrop_types = qw/splish splash splosh/;
my %hash_slice = %raindrop_types[0, 2];
# hash_slice is (0 => 'splish', 2 => 'splosh')

Android

Yes that’s right, Perl 5.20 compiles on Android! The current documentation is online, and will be accessible via “perldoc android” once you’ve installed 5.20.

Performance improvements

Perl 5.20 is faster in all kinds of areas - the perldelta for 5.20 lists 17 performance improvements, covering things like faster regexes, hash key lookups and string copying. Matthew Horsfall blogged about some of the changes as did Stefan Müller.

Miscellaneous

Subroutine prototypes can now be declared as subroutine attribute with the “prototype” keyword. For example:

# usual prototype
sub example ($$) {}

# prototype declared via attribute
sub example :prototype($$) {}

Faster Windows installation - ~15 minutes can be saved from the installation process due to the fix of a “make test” bug. Additionally, Perl can now be built using the Visual C++ 2013 compiler.

Perl 5.20 uses the latest Unicode version 6.3 up from 6.2 (Unicode changelog).

The rand function now uses an internal platform independent random number generator. Previously Perl would use a platform specific random number generator leading to inconsistent quality of random number generation.

Deprecations

CGI and its associated modules are being removed from core (Sawyer X must be happy).

Module::Build is also being removed from core. David Golden blogged about this last year.

Setting a non-integer reference value to the input record separator variable (“$/”) will throw a fatal exception (but undef is still fine).

Conclusion

There is a lot more to 5.20 than the summary items mentioned above. For a list of all the changes see perldelta. Perl 5.20 is the most exciting release in years. Thanks to the Perl 5 Porters team for doing an incredible job of delivering an exceptional new Perl!

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This article was originally posted on PerlTricks.com.