A modernization of the canonical doc for learning XS

A new version of the documentation for using xsubs in perl extension code is part of the Perl 5.43.6 devel-branch package.

This is news from Reddit r/perl yesterday and also mentioned at TPF and I think it's significant enough to have a mention here at Perlmonks too.

r/perl user Grinnz posted:

David Mitchell completely rewrote the perlxs reference manual for the XS language for extending Perl in C. The rewritten version was just released in the development release 5.43.6 and will be included in the next stable release of Perl.

I used

pod2pdf

to generate a PDF version of the document* once I'd built 5.43.6 (using perlbrew btw) and it's 77 pages in US-Letter size format. I didn't check for the length of the previous version of

perlxs.pod

but 77 pages is a small book; this is not a minor achievement but rather a significant contribution of the sort that does not always get the recognition and accolades it deserves.

* I put it in my Google Drive, hopefully I've got the settings right so that you should be able to download it from there. Or just run

pod2pdf

on the pod yourself, of course–it's not a difficult tool to use).

[localtime://2025-12-22T13:17:48-05:00]