What happened to Perl 7?

When we last heard from Perl, Perl 6 was going off on its own becoming Raku, Perl 5 was going to continue until version 5.36 which would serve as the basis for Perl NG, and Perl NG would be known as Perl 7 because Raku burned the Perl 6 namespace. No one saw the humor in “not that Perl 6, the other Perl 6”.

Anyway, the Perl Steering Committee (PSC) decided to write a blog post about the future of Perl and Perl 7.

The first PSC was elected in late 2020, and one of our first tasks was to create a plan for the future of Perl, and to put that in motion. A lot of discussion and iteration followed, but the strategy we agreed is:

1. Existing sensibly-written Perl 5 code should continue to run under future releases of Perl. Sometimes this won’t be possible, for example if a security bug requires a change that breaks backward compatibility.

2. We want to drive the language forwards, increasing the rate at which new features are introduced. This resulted in the introduction of the RFC process, which anyone can use to propose language changes.

3. We want to make it easy for people to use these new features, and want to do what we can to encourage their adoption.

[…]

At some point in the future, the PSC may decide that the set of features, taken together, represent a big enough step forward to justify a new baseline for Perl. If that happens, then the version will be bumped to 7.0.

So basically, nothing is going to change. Perl 5 will continue on into infinity adding features as it has been doing.

51 Comments

  1. 2022-05-26 10:59 pm
    • 2022-05-26 11:59 pm
      • 2022-05-27 2:23 am
    • 2022-05-27 11:48 am
      • 2022-05-27 12:18 pm
        • 2022-05-30 3:40 pm
          • 2022-05-30 3:55 pm
          • 2022-05-30 5:30 pm
          • 2022-05-30 8:50 pm
          • 2022-05-31 2:51 am
          • 2022-05-31 6:24 pm
          • 2022-06-01 2:51 am
          • 2022-06-01 8:51 am
        • 2022-05-30 3:51 pm
          • 2022-05-30 6:26 pm
          • 2022-05-31 9:30 am
          • 2022-05-31 10:00 am
          • 2022-05-31 10:28 am
          • 2022-05-31 8:59 pm
          • 2022-05-31 10:19 pm
          • 2022-05-31 11:21 pm
          • 2022-05-31 11:50 pm
      • 2022-05-27 2:33 pm
        • 2022-05-29 7:00 am
  2. 2022-05-27 7:28 pm
    • 2022-05-28 7:48 pm
      • 2022-05-29 4:31 am
        • 2022-05-29 7:03 am
          • 2022-05-30 2:41 am
          • 2022-05-31 3:11 pm
          • 2022-05-31 6:49 pm
          • 2022-05-31 8:16 pm
        • 2022-05-30 4:01 pm
          • 2022-05-30 9:06 pm
          • 2022-05-31 3:14 pm
        • 2022-05-31 3:02 pm
          • 2022-05-31 11:41 pm
          • 2022-06-01 5:58 pm
          • 2022-06-01 7:07 pm
          • 2022-06-01 10:00 pm
          • 2022-06-02 2:08 pm
  3. 2022-05-28 8:33 pm
    • 2022-05-30 2:47 am
    • 2022-05-30 4:15 pm
      • 2022-05-31 3:27 pm
        • 2022-06-01 3:08 am
          • 2022-06-01 6:15 pm
    • 2022-05-31 6:53 pm