From: Jarkko Hietaniemi Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 23:41:52 +0000 (+0000) Subject: Go on record about the binary backward incompatibility. X-Git-Url: http://git.shadowcat.co.uk/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?a=commitdiff_plain;h=6cc60dfb2a8776ed38cabadaa23ec442bec7ba81;p=p5sagit%2Fp5-mst-13.2.git Go on record about the binary backward incompatibility. p4raw-id: //depot/perl@16120 --- diff --git a/pod/perldelta.pod b/pod/perldelta.pod index b742b19..02ddf88 100644 --- a/pod/perldelta.pod +++ b/pod/perldelta.pod @@ -46,6 +46,21 @@ More Extensive Regression Testing =head1 Incompatible Changes +=head2 Binary Incompatibility + +Perl 5.8 has not been designed to be binary compatible with earlier +releases of Perl. While the compatibility has not been intentionally +broken, it has not been intentionally protected, either. The major +reason for the discontinity is the new IO architecture called PerlIO. +The PerlIO is the default configuration because without it many new +features of Perl 5.8 cannot be used. In other words: you just have +to recompile your modules, sorry about that. + +In future releases of Perl non-PerlIO aware XS modules may become +completely unsupported. This shouldn't be too difficult for module +authors, however: PerlIO has been designed as a drop-in replacement +(at the source code level) for the stdio interface. + =head2 64-bit platforms and malloc If your pointers are 64 bits wide, the Perl malloc is no longer being