Personally, the lowest I go is 5.6, because that introduced:

However, sometimes I require 5.8, because that improved the Unicode support and had some changes to I/O, i.e. PerlIO (plus it has safe signals).

As for what the lowest version you should support for a new module, IMHO: I think good reasons to support the versions above might be: because your module is providing some feature that users of the above Perls might not otherwise have, or because you happen to know that some people who are stuck on 5.6 and 5.8 might need your module. Otherwise, I'd suggest starting with 5.10, since that introduced // and several regex improvements, such as named capture buffers.

Newer versions of course have nice features, just some examples:

However, personally I find that for libraries I release, I'm ok with sticking to the 5.10 feature set (excluding smart matching, of course). For scripts that I write, I'll often go with 5.26 and up.

Update: Added an item to the list, thanks Discipulus!


In reply to Re: Determining minimum Perl version for new module by haukex
in thread Determining minimum Perl version for new module by wanna_code_perl

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