This Week on perl5-porters (29 December / 4 January 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (29 December / 4 January 2003)
  At the turn of the year, and in accordance with the grand schedule of
  things, occurred a code freeze for perl 5.8.3. Read below for the rest
  of the discussion that took place on perl5-porters.

Cloning in XS
  Stas Bekman is writing a working demo implementation of the CLONE()
  function, for people who want to write multithread-friendly XS modules,
  without overlooking any case. Jan Dubois suggests that h2xs should know
  about CLONE() and insert the appropriate boilerplates; because currently
  the amount of code necessary to make an XS implementation of CLONE()
  work is too big.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=r5l1vv00ca033k7a06d40fgei1ion91rnp%404ax.com

  Also related to cloning, but more general (as it affects pure-perl
  code), is bug #24383 : during cloning, hashes with the :unique
  attribute weren't made readonly on the interpreter clone. This was fixed
  by Dave Mitchell.

XS leaks when returning AVs/HVs
  Marcus Holland-Moritz suspects that the code generated by xsubpp to
  return arrays and hashes from XS subroutines is potentially leaking
  memory. As some modules on CPAN appear to work around this, it's already
  too late to change it -- but this should be documented.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040102022350.258b763d.mhx-perl%40gmx.net

unpack() and UTF-8
  While discussing bug #24767 -- a pack()/unpack() combination that's
  apparently not idempotent -- Wolfgang Laun asks the question : should
  unpack() warn when certain unpack codes are applied to an UTF-8 input?
  This needs further thinking.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=DF27CDCBD2581D4B88431901094E4B4D02B0C4B2%40attmsx1

Modules upgraded
  Johan Vromans released Getopt::Long 2.34_01, introducing a new
  experimental feature : options with more than one value.

      http://search.cpan.org/src/JV/Getopt-Long-2.34_01/CHANGES

  Dan Kogai released Encode 1.99, a bug-fix release. Tels released
  Math::Bigint 1.68. Andy Lester released Test::Harness 2.40. Ken Williams
  released Cwd 2.13.

In Brief
  By doing some benchmarking, Marcus Holland-Moritz reaches the conclusion
  that using the optimization level "-O3" on Linux with gcc is not worth
  it. He suggests to default to "-O2" instead.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=071601c3d020$4046d2a0$d500a8c0%40R2D2

  Craig Berry posted a status of maintperl on VMS. Several thinks need
  fixing, including MakeMaker (for which he provided a patch); but maybe
  Nicholas will decide to release perl 5.8.3 with the same version of
  MakeMaker that shipped with 5.8.2.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=p06020403bc176fb12538%40[172.16.52.1]

About
  This summary was written in the early days of 2004 by Rafael
  Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/
  and posted on a mailing list, which subscription address is
  [email protected]. Corrections and comments are welcome.