Features List

ActivePerl is the industry-standard Perl distribution, available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX. Developers worldwide rely on ActivePerl's completeness and ease-of-use, while corporate users protect their infrastructure and stay competitive with quality-assured ActivePerl business solutions.

Current releases: ActivePerl 5.10.0, ActivePerl 5.8.8.824

ActivePerl is maintained on two tracks to support users who have moved to Perl 5.10, as well as those still using Perl 5.8.

Complete ActivePerl Package

Perl

Binary of core Perl distribution

Perl Package Manager
ActiveState's Perl extension installer and manager; allows for easy installation and management of modules and extensions

Installers

A variety of installers are available for quick installation of ActivePerl:

• Windows: Microsoft Windows (MSI) and ActiveState installer packages
• Mac OS X: Disk image containing the installer package
• Solaris: Sun and ActiveState installer packages
• Linux: Redhat, Debian and ActiveState installer packages
• HP-UX: ActiveState installer packages
• AIX: ActiveState installer packages

Complete online documentation

ActivePerl 5.10.0

Latest release: ActivePerl 5.10.0.1004

New in ActivePerl 5.10.0.1004

• Uses the new and more comprehensive PPM repositories (on Windows and Linux), as well as the latest PPM 4.3 client, which is a lot faster at updating repository information.
• Many bug fixes and changes since build 1003.

For a complete list of changes, see the release notes.

View the release notes.

ActivePerl 5.10 Highlights

• Switch statement and smart-match operator
• Defined-or operator
• Many improvements to regular expressions
  • engine is no longer recursive: no more stack overflows
  • recursive patterns
  • named capture groups
  • possessive quantifiers
  • backtracking control verbs
  • relative backreferences
• new say() function
• lexical $_ variable
• _ prototype
• UNITCHECK blocks
• state variables
• stacked filetest operators
• byte-order modifiers for pack() and unpack()
• Additional core modules
• Many bug fixes
• Extended documentation

ActivePerl 5.8.8.824

Latest release: ActivePerl 5.8.8.824, based on Perl 5.8.8

New in ActivePerl 5.8.8.824

• One year's worth of bug fixes and improvements from the Perl maintenance track, as well as many new modules including Crypt::SSLeay, DBD::Oracle and lots of others.
• The latest PPM 4.3 client, which is a lot faster at updating repository information.

For a complete list of changes, see the release notes.

ActivePerl 5.8 Highlights

This series is based on core Perl 5.8.8. Significant changes that have occurred in 5.8 development are documented in perldelta.

Modules

• The Win32 module now includes the Win32::IsAdminUser() function that checks if the current interpreter runs with Administrator privileges
• Time::HiRes now provides high resolution on Windows

Windows 2003

Support for Windows Server 2003

Large file access support

• File manipulation facilities within perl can cope with files larger than 2GB or 4GB
• Supported on all platforms

PPM

PPM4 is now included as the default ppm utility

Unicode support

ActivePerl 8xx series builds are not binary-compatible with the older 6xx and 5xx series builds. In particular, do not attempt to use extensions or PPM packages built for the 6xx and 5xx series builds with ActivePerl 8xx series builds and vice versa.

Want more details?
Check out the complete Feature List.