What versions of Perl are you using?

Question

According to the Perl source page on CPAN, 5.8.9 is now 14 days old and will be the latest version 5.8. 5.10.0 is older than a year and is supposedly ready for use in Production.

Leaving aside the discussion of Perl 6, may I ask which versions of Perl people are tested, deployed and used in production? We are currently standardized to 5.8.8 on our Ubuntu (workstation) and Solaris (production) platforms, and I wonder what the pros and cons are for taking a small step up to 5.8.9 or a larger one - up to 5.10.0.

Answer 1

According to a Perl survey conducted more than a year ago, preceding 5.10, as people use the minimal version of Perl, people use ...

4.x 3% 5.0.x 3% 5.4.x 2% 5.5.x 6% 5.6.x 17% 5.8.x 66% 

and the maximum is ...

 5.6.x 3% 5.8.x 88% 5.9.x 5% 

5.6.1 and 5.8.8 are most popular in their main group. Missed percentages are different versions.

Since the survey did not determine what “use” means, i.e. if you actually run production code on it or if you just test your software against it for backward compatibility or just use it for hits, the minimum size can be taken with salt.

This data and the general lack of user feedback lead to the fact that I refuse 5.5.x support from modules of the installation modules of the modules that I support (MakeMaker and Test :: More) effectively 5.5.x end of life . 5.6 has been suspended, but is still on death row.

Personally, I just recently switched from 5.8.8 to 5.10.0. I know about places that still use 5.6.1 in older applications, but they have moved to 5.8.8 as much as possible for all new developers. I do not know who is still using 5.5 in production. For backward compatibility, I am testing 5.6.2, 5.8.8, and 5.10.0. The numbers say that I should test 5.6.1 instead of 5.6.2, but so far I can be arrested by people who will not even be updated to the latest version of error correction in their line.

Answer 2

I use Perl 5.10.0 in development and 5.8.8 in production, and the code is checked for compatibility. But I did not see as many internal Perl errors as in Perl version 5.10.0. This is really terrible. I have reported three easily reproducible allegations of violations and major dumps, and am still dealing with some strange difficulties in reproducing errors that cause kernel flushes, memory leaks, etc.

Answer 3

Perl 5.8.8 (and will be at least until 5.10.1) of our production environment. Performance regressions in 5.10.0 (regarding the assignment of @_ in a substring, for example) make production impossible for us.

But we are launching our test suites with 5.8.8 and 5.10.0 in order to prepare our transition to 5.10.x in the future. I am trying to create a system that will compile bleadperl and run our test suites with this ...

Answer 4

Primary development 5.10, QA and production 5.8.8.

Answer 5

We use v5.6.1 on our production server. We're probably old school .: P

If there are no specific functions that you need, I think that simply updating may require a lot of testing for all related components.

So this only answers your first question. For the second, you can explore what new features are in the new version.

Answer 6

I mainly use Perl 5.10.0. I check backward compatibility on 5.6.1 and 5.8.8. I still have Perl 5.5.3, which I sometimes use. (I still have a source for 5.4.4 - or 5.004_04, as it was then called, it is not currently built, and I can think of several reasons why I will need to do this.)

Thanks for the info on 5.8.9. I need to do this.

Answer 7

I just started using 5.10.0 a few weeks ago, but I continue to test my modules on 5.8. When I upload something to CPAN, I will try to make it compatible with 5.6, if possible.

Answer 8

You may also like my answer to How do you use Perl modules for Linux? . I install several versions of Perl and test many of them.

Answer 9

5.8.8 on FreeBSD for production and development. We are getting ready to deploy VM / jail for testing 5.10 in (to check compatibility for the future).

Answer 10

I use Perl 5.10 , mainly because I can hardly wait for more complete Perl6 implementations