Perl 5.42 is out today as the newest feature release for this popular programming language that comes one year after the prior Perl 5.40 release.
Perl 5.42 ships with Unicode 16.0 support, new experimental features of the “any” and “all” operators for list processing, a new “:writer” attribute for field variables, more CORE:: subroutines like “chdir”, a new “source::encoding” pragma, various performance enhancements, security fixes, and a variety of other changes.
Among the performance changes in Perl 5.32 are making constant-folded strings shareable with the copy-on-write mechanism, faster tr/// speed, and various other optimizations. Many Perl modules have also seen updates for today’s Perl 5.42 release.
More details on the Perl 5.42 changes can be found from the prior RC1 notes. Perl 5.42 can be downloaded from Perl.org.
