in reply to perl v5.38.0 is now available

That's good news!

Here's somewhat related news: For those of you who are using Emacs to edit their Perl sources: I just pushed a version of cperl-mode.el to the repository which supports the new keywords and syntax of Perl 5.36 (try/catch/finally, defer, subroutine signatures) and 5.38 (class, method, field, ADJUST). If you have Emacs 27 or newer, you can directly download and use it from the Emacs repository. If you want to use it with Emacs 26, please speak up, backporting should be doable. Meanwhile, I'll check whether it is possible to get cperl-mode.el into a "dual" mode so that it can be installed via ELPA.

Feedback is appreciated: I know that different people write Perl in very different styles, and there are lots of features in CPerl mode which I don't use, haven't touched and don't know about.