NEWS: Jan 4 2023 The latest version of Perl is 5.36, see perl.org
Greetings VMS perl users. There has been a long period with little activity. I plan to change that. Please watch this space for more news, and the status of the website. Perl 5.34 runs on VMS, and I have no reports of issues. Please let me know if you have issues. I plan to add a capability to sign on the website soon; then you will be able to reply directly to me, Carl Friedberg.
Oct 21, 2021 Craig Berry has created a test build of Perl 5.34 for VMS 9.1-A. Please take it out for a test, and report the results to the VSI beta test. Because compilers for x86 are not yet available natively, the Perl distribution (if you roll your own) will have to be built on an Itanium, and that will take a fair amount of jumping through hoops. This does mean the normal extensive perl test suite has not been run.
You may have to look around a bit, I found the kit named VMSPORTS-X86VMS-PERL534-T0534-0-1.zip
Older:
Perl 5.26.2 is available, April 15, 2018!
Craig Berry writes: Installation kits for OpenVMS Alpha and OpenVMS I64 v8.4 and later are available at:
<https://sourceforge.net/projects/vmsperlkit/files/>
The files are self-extracting archives and after downloading you must run them like so:
$ run VMSPORTS-AXPVMS-PERL526-V0526-2-1.SFX_AXPEXE
for Alpha, and:
$ run VMSPORTS-I64VMS-PERL526-V0526-2-1.SFX_I64EXE
for Itanium. Then, on either platform:
$ product install perl526
and follow the usual installation prompts. Note that the major version is now included in the product name so this installation will not remove installations of previous versions (e.g., 5.24 or 5.22).
The kits provided here are intended to be a convenient way to acquire a default build; there are many other configuration options available if you build your own Perl from the source at <http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/>.
Have an appropriate amount of fun. Anything related to these kits that turns out to be more fun than you can handle is probably best reported on the vmsperl mailing list.[1]
Changes in this release can be found via typing “perldoc perldelta” after installation or, since this is the first kit I’ve released in the 5.26.x series, you may wish to start with “perldoc perl5260delta” and also look at perl5261delta and perl5262delta. Or view on the web at:
<https://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob/refs/heads/maint-5.26:/pod/perl5260delta.pod>
<https://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob/refs/heads/maint-5.26:/pod/perl5261delta.pod>
<https://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob/refs/heads/maint-5.26:/pod/perl5262delta.pod>