Perl 5.44.0-RC1 is now available

Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation.
It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by
vague ritual.

    -- Frank Herbert - Dune Messiah

We are excited to announce version 5.44.0-RC1,
the first release candidate of version 5.44 of Perl.

You will soon be able to download Perl 5.44.0-RC1 from your
favorite CPAN mirror or find it at:

https://metacpan.org/release/LEONT/perl-5.44.0-RC1/

SHA256 digests for this release are:

 84e7e11b576812c0b742215bb5fe8082893bb667ed505f3b8f300fb4acfae367
perl-5.44.0-RC1.tar.gz
 6949e911eabc2eb47e74b4649c36a8a9a0f2e98606920c16626fb0e8cd2bc706
perl-5.44.0-RC1.tar.xz

You can find a full list of changes in the file "perldelta.pod" located in
the "pod" directory inside the release and on the web at

https://metacpan.org/release/LEONT/perl-5.44.0-RC1/view/pod/perldelta.pod

Perl 5.44.0 represents approximately 12 months of development since Perl
5.42.0 and contains approximately 270,000 lines of changes across 1,300
files from 71 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were
approximately 110,000 lines of changes to 860 .pm, .t, .c and .h files.

Perl continues to flourish into its fourth decade thanks to a vibrant
community of users and developers. The following people are known to have
contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.44.0:

Alexander Karelas, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Arne Johannessen, Bartosz Jarzyna,
Branislav Zahradník, brian d foy, Chad Granum, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams,
Chris Prather, Christian Hansen, Craig A. Berry, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker,
Dan Book, Dan Church, Daniel Dragan, Daniel Laügt, Daniel Tang, Dan Kogai,
Dave Cross, David Mitchell, Dmitrii Kuvaiskii, E. Choroba, Ed J, Elvin
Aslanov, Eric Herman, Eugen Konkov, Graham Knop, Harald Jörg, H.Merijn
Brand, Igor Todorovski, James Cook, James E Keenan, James Raspass, Jörg
Thomas, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, Leon Timmermans, Lukas Mai, Marc
Reisner, Masahiro Iuchi, Matthew Horsfall, Maxim Vuets, Max Maischein,
Nicolas R, Olaf Alders, Paul Evans, Paul Marquess, Peter John Acklam,
Philippe Bruhat (BooK), Ricardo Signes, Richard Leach, Robert Rothenberg,
Ryan Carsten Schmidt, Samuel Smith, Samuel Young, Scott Baker, Sevan
Janiyan, Shirakata Kentaro, Sisyphus, Stan Ulbrych, Stefan Adams, Štěpán
Němec, Steve Hay, TAKAI Kousuke, Thibault Duponchelle, Toby Inkster, Tomasz
Konojacki, Tom Wyant, Tony Cook, Unicode Consortium, Yitzchak
Scott-Thoennes.

The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically
generated from version control history. In particular, it does not include
the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who reported issues to
the Perl bug tracker.

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules
included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for
helping Perl to flourish.

For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors, please
see the F<AUTHORS> file in the Perl source distribution.

Support for the 5.40.x release series will end shortly.
Please refer to L<perlpolicy> for version support information.

We expect to release version 5.44.0 in the following weeks.

Leon