Perl Grant Approved: Improve Perl 5

For 2006 Q1, only one grant was approved, but it's fantastic. Nicholas Clark is going to spend some time fixing some long-standing issues with Perl 5. Way to go, Nicholas!

Some issues which will be resolved:

Fix bugs affecting Unicode handling, Class::DBI, Tk and PAR.
Allow relocatable Perl installations, which permits developers to distribute applications complete with a bundled Perl.
Support source filters as part of code references in @INC
Complete lexical pragmas, a milestone on the way to 5.10
Further memory saving for 5.10 - previous work saved >33% for hashes and arrays
Merge Larry's p5-p6 work into core, which will allow others to start contributing to it.

See the Perl Foundation blog for more information.

Cheers,
Ovid

New address of my CGI Course.

Comment on Perl Grant Approved: Improve Perl 5

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Perl Grant Approved: Improve Perl 5 by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Feb 22, 2006 at 18:02 UTC
Allow relocatable Perl installations, which permits developers to distribute applications complete with a bundled Perl. A big round of applause!! Installing modules without root access will finally become trivial. (It’s not hard right now, but it’s a pain to get it going, particularly if you want CPAN.pm to Just Work, and a novice will not easily figure it out.) This should be a huge boon to Perl – huge. Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply]
Re^2: Perl Grant Approved: Improve Perl 5 by dsb (Chaplain) on Feb 22, 2006 at 21:53 UTC
Agreed. There have been a number of occasions where I've said to myself, "If only Perl was installed on all of the companies machines." dsb This `@ISA my( $cool ) %SIG`	[reply]
Re^3: Perl Grant Approved: Improve Perl 5 by Tanktalus (Canon) on Feb 23, 2006 at 00:28 UTC
For me, it has been a number of occasions where I've said to others, "If only we could easily distribute pre-compiled perl." One less barrier here would dramatically improve the quality of our code: we could convert the rest of our shell code into perl! :-)	[reply]
Re^2: Perl Grant Approved: Improve Perl 5 by BUU (Prior) on Feb 24, 2006 at 02:30 UTC
Er, perhaps I'm a tad confused, but what exactly is stopping me frmo distributing a compiled perl right now? Activestate seems to manage it..	[reply]
Re^3: Perl Grant Approved: Improve Perl 5 by chromatic (Archbishop) on Feb 24, 2006 at 06:30 UTC
I have the impression that AS compiles their Perl with an exceedingly long sets of library paths, then edits the binary after installation to use the actual installation paths on that machine. Clever, but a hack.	[reply]
Re^4: Perl Grant Approved: Improve Perl 5 by Corion (Patriarch) on Feb 24, 2006 at 07:48 UTC
Re^4: Perl Grant Approved: Improve Perl 5 by syphilis (Archbishop) on Feb 24, 2006 at 08:58 UTC