Greg, Perl 5.20.0 was released in May and is considered stable. In addition to missing out on a number feature enhancements by using 5.8.8, you're also missing out on many optimizations that significantly improve performance, including 5.20's copy-on-write.
I'd personally recommend upgrading, but, as always, doing so carefully. There are a handful of undocumented features and reliably buggy behavior from 5.8.8 that have been removed. See "Incompatible Changes" and "Deprecations" in the deltas. Chances are you're not actually using any, though. Note also that some core distributions (e.g. CGI.pm) are no longer core, and may need to be installed directly on your deployments, depending on your codebase. For more information on 5.20 specifically, I'd recommend viewing Ricardo Signes' presentation on it at YAPC::NA a few days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1LHFKGHceY Hope this helps. Thanks, Jordan Adler On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 11:17 AM, Greg London <[email protected]> wrote: > > one of the IT guys at work just asked what > I thought about installing version 5.20.0 of perl > on all our computers. > > We currently have 5.8.8. > > I don't even know if 5.20 is considered "stable" or not. > Buggy? Issues? > > Is a different version better? > > Thoughts? > > My experience with IT > (at every job I've ever worked at) > is usually one of > "You have perl 5.4, that should be good enough". > so, I wanted to make the most of this. > > Greg > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Boston-pm mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm > _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
