Although I mostly agree, I'll try to upload a new release of Data::Diver in short order that adds local($@) any places that it uses eval.

And thanks for mentioning $@ as it saved me from figuring out what was really going on, because I was immediately pretty sure that the problem wasn't with $!, but I didn't immediately realize what the real problem was.

Here is another, docs lead me to believe these should all work but Dive doesn't

#!/usr/bin/perl --
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Diver qw/ Dive DiveRef DiveDie /;
sub say { print @_, "\n"; }
say DiveDie( DiveRef( { qw/ key val / }, \'key' ) );
say DiveDie( Dive( { qw/ key val / }, \'key' ) );
__END__
SCALAR(0x3f90cc)
Key not present in hash using SCALAR(0xabe37c) on HASH(0x3f90dc) (from
+ Data::Diver).
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Problem is in sub Dive, when you're testing if $ref is a hash with eval, you forgot the 1, this line
-        } elsif(  eval { exists $ref->{$key} }  ) {
+        } elsif(  eval { exists $ref->{$key}; 1 }  ) {

I've tested it it works , your test suite doesn't test for this so maybe add to Data-Diver-1.0101/t/base.t the following

ok( 'val', Dive( { qw/ key val / }, \'key' ) );
ok( 'val', Dive( { qw/ key val / }, 'key' ) );
ok( 'val', DiveVal( { qw/ key val / }, \'key' ) );
ok( 'val', DiveVal( { qw/ key val / }, 'key' ) );
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Also remember the Replacment for Data::Diver due missing license

For the honor