I've seen several cases of test failures and user complaints about my modules as a consequence of using Scalar::Util::weaken(). The error message is Error: Weak references are not implemented in the version of perl at (...). After looking at the Scalar::Util code, I found that this message occurs when the module is installed with the -pm option to Makefile.PL or when Makefile.PL couldn't find a C compiler. I can imagine this happening when a user installs Scalar::Util, but the strange thing is that it seems that in most cases they were using a perl-5.8.x "out of the box", which includes Scalar::Util as part of the core distribution.

Has anyone else noticed this? I've seen this message in Linux, Windows, and Cygwin.

Update: Thanks for all the answers. I'm happy to hear that I'm not alone. :-)

In reply to Recent perl distributions without support for Scalar::Util::weaken() ? by itub

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