Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly (perl.com)

Article summary

Perl 7 is announced, which will be based on Perl 5.32 with modern defaults, aiming to simplify the language while maintaining backward compatibility. The new version will have different settings, but the codebase will remain largely the same. Perl 5 will go into long-term maintenance mode, and Perl 7 is expected to be released within a year. The change is intended to make Perl more appealing to new users and to allow for future development without being held back by extreme backward compatibility.

Main themes

• Perl 7 announcement
• backward compatibility
• language performance
• modernization efforts
• production use cases
• benchmarking and comparison

What commenters say

• Perl is still a viable and efficient language for certain use cases, such as text processing and scripting.
• The language's backward compatibility is both a strength and a weakness, as it allows old code to run but also makes it difficult to introduce new features.
• Perl's performance is comparable to or better than other languages like Python, especially for specific tasks like regex processing.
• The decision to jump to Perl 7 instead of Perl 6 is due to the existing use of the Perl 6 name by the Raku language.
• Some commenters disagree on the efficiency and speed of Perl compared to other languages, with some citing benchmarks that show Perl's superiority and others arguing that the benchmarks are flawed or incomplete.
• The use of Perl in production environments is still significant, with some companies relying heavily on the language for their infrastructure.
• The introduction of Perl 7 is seen as an opportunity to modernize the language and make it more attractive to new developers, while still maintaining support for existing codebases.