The first new Perl release of 2011 is now available, providing users of the open source language with improved Unicode, IPv6 and exception handling.
Perl 5.14 also aims to be a more efficient version of Perl with the promise of using less memory and CPU than previous releases. Hobbs noted that he didn’t have exact metrics on the performance delta as it depends on the actual user application.
“One of the key speed improvements (up to 100x faster string appends) we had already backported to our ActivePerl 5.12 series,” Jeff Hobbs, Director of Engineering at ActiveState told InternetNews.com. “Others are smaller memory or performance gains that can add up over the lifetime of a larger application, covering various aspects such as regular expression match to function call to threads.”