Perl 5.14 Released

A new stable release for Perl has been released. It's not yet Perl 6, but the developer has added so many features that will also be available in the future Perl 6. Some new features that are highlight of this release are:

• 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

For complete new features and changes on this release, please have a look on PerlDelta.

After this release, the developers aren't stopping. They have created a roadmap towards future Perl 5.16:

We will release Perl 5.14.1 in approximately one month. This
patch release will include corrections for any significant issues
discovered in this release but will not include new features or
any incompatible changes.

Perl 5.16 will be released in the spring of 2012. If you'd like to help
shape Perl 5's future, please join us on the perl5-porters mailing list.