Perl v5.24 new features

Perl v5.24 may not look like it’s packed full of exciting features (indeed, it removes some of them) but it has lots of improvements under the hood. Here’s some of the user-visible features you might like.

• The \b{lb} is a zero-width assertion for a location where it’s suitable to break a line. This steals from the Unicode::LineBreak module. This adds to the other special \b{...} sequences. See perlrebackslash.
• bitwise operations on wide strings are disallowed, but also see the bitwise feature.
• Lexical $_ is gone, as is autoderef.
• Postfix dereferencing is stable.
• printf and sprintf allowed re-ordered precision arguments.
• sysread, syswrite, recv, and send are deprecated for :utf8 handles
• There’s some faster math
• Subroutine calls are faster

You can read through the perldelta documentation.