From the Perl Foundation blog

A new version of Perl, 5.14, was officially released on 14th May following the successful test period, including the testing of release candidates. This is the first release of Perl 5 using the new annual schedule.

There are a number of enhancements and alterations in this version, a full list of changes can be found at (http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob/HEAD:/pod/perldelta.pod), a summary of some of the changes:

  • Unicode 6.0 support, along with many, many improvements to our Unicode-related features
  • Improved support for IPv6
  • Significantly easier autoconfiguration of the CPAN client
  • A new /r flag which makes s/// substitutions non-destructive
  • New regular expression flags to control whether matched strings should be treated as ASCII or Unicode
  • New "package Foo { }" syntax
  • Uses less memory and CPU than previous releases
  • A swathe of bug fixes, a large number associated with the work of Dave Mitchell (http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/05/fixing-perl5-core-bugs-report-11.html) who has been fixing some deep bugs thanks to a TPF grant;

It is important to note that this version marks the official end of support for Perl 5.10.

This work is just one year of development since the release of Perl 5.12.0. It contains nearly 550,000 lines of changes from close to 3,000 files, this work was done by 150 authors and committers. The documentation, as always, pays tribute to those people who worked hard on this new version, "Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish." The success of this version is dependent on the great work of the whole community, a particular note of thanks should go to Jesse Vincent for his coordination skills as release manager for 5.14.