Perl 5.14 released

The new version of Perl - 5.14 - was officially released on May 14 after a successful testing period. This is the first release of Perl 5, released on a new schedule - the release of stable versions will now occur once a year.

In this version there are a number of improvements and changes, the full list of which can be found at http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob/HEAD:/pod/perldelta.pod . Among the main changes:

• Unicode 6.0 support, along with many improvements to Unicode related functions
• improved IPv6 support;
• the auto configuration of the CPAN client has been greatly simplified;
• new flag / r, which makes replacements s ///, without changing the contents of the working variable;
• new regular expression flags to indicate that the expression should be compiled as ASCII or Unicode;
• new syntax "package foo {}";
• compared to previous releases, less memory and processor is used;
• a lot of bug fixes, a large number of which is related to the work of Dave Mitchell , who corrected some of the most important errors for the The Perl Foundation grant.

The release of this version marks the official termination of support for Perl 5.10.

Development of the version took one year since the release of Perl 5.12.0. 150 authors added and changed about 550 thousand lines in almost 3 thousand files. This version owes its release to the CPAN community, as well as to the entire Perl community. A separate contribution belongs to Jesse Vincent - release manager of Perl 5.14.