Sawyer X, Perl’s volunteer Project Lead, announced at The Perl Conference in the Cloud that Perl will make the jump to a new major version, Perl 7. This allows the next version to accept saner, more modern default settings. So far, Perl 5 has been compatible back its first release in 1994. Perl 7, expected to be released within the next year, sets defaults and enables features that most people use today. When Perl 7 is released, Perl 5 will go into long term maintenance for an extended window far beyond its normal two-year, two version support policy. Supported Perl 5 versions will continue to get important security and bug fixes.

Perl 7 will be essentially Perl 5.32, released in June 2020, but with different default settings. For instance, the strict and warnings features will automatically be enabled. These are already encouraged in Perl 5 but must be enabled by the programmer. The next major version will include a compatibility mechanism to reset all defaults to work with Perl 5.32. Perl 7 is already under development and major stakeholders are testing pre-release versions.