Lifecycle guide for Perl from Perl Foundation

All releases, patches, maintenance and support periods at a glance

All supported products Free Versio.io trial

📅 Last update on 2026-09-06

What is Perl?

Automate product release and end-of-life management

Perl is a highly capable, feature-rich programming language with over 30 years of development.

The entire lifecycle of Perl

The following figure shows you the visualised product life cycle of Perl. You can see all releases with the latest patch version, the long-term support characteristics (orange flag in the green circle, the periods for version provision, maintenance and support.

Perl (Perl Foundation) release, version and end-of-life information

Figure: Release, patch and end-of-life cycle of product Perl (Perl Foundation)

What is the Perl release strategy?

To the best of our ability, we will attempt to fix critical issues in the two most recent stable 5.x release series. Fixes for the current release series take precedence over fixes for the previous release series. To the best of our ability, we will provide "critical" security patches / releases for any major version of Perl whose 5.x.0 release was within the past three years. We can only commit to providing these for the most recent .y release in any 5.x.y series. We will not provide security updates or bug fixes for development releases of Perl.

Facts and figures about Perl

Product

Perl

Vendor

Perl Foundation

Latest version

5.45.2

Number of releases

Number of versions

393

Number of unstable versions

121

Number of versions affected by CVE

263

Licence

Artistic license 1.0 or GNU General Public License

Licence details

https://dev.perl.org/licenses/artistic.html

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl

Questions or interested? Talk to me!

Lukas Böttcher

Business Development Manager

P: +49-30-221986-51

M: lukas.boettcher@versio.io