autodie release 1.10_06 - Codename chocolateboy
I'm very pleased to say that the next release of autodie is making its way to CPAN. The release's codename is "chocolateboy", after the wonderful author of autobox who spent many hours discussing the inner workings of pragmas, provided thousands of words of advice, and who allowed me to use him as a sounding-board when I had far too many ideas and not enough implementation.

The new version provides massive improvements in Perl 5.8 support, including:

• User subroutines can be lexicalised
• Fatal and autodie can be used together
• Fatal backwards compatibility mode fixed
• autodie will no longer cause weird interactions with autobox
• Better error messages
• Lower memory overheads
• Faster loading

I've still got a huge list of things left to do, but this release is a major stepping stone since it contains code that can lexicalise arbitrary subroutines, with many thanks to ikegami for help in debugging.

My next big tasks are:

• Moving the Perl 5.10 implementation to use the Perl 5.8 code, which is actually faster and has less side-effects.
• Writing a whole stack of documentation on how to use it, why you'd want to, and what bugs exist.
• Having a really good think about the autodie::exception interface. I'm planning to bounce ideas off the Moose crowd for this one.

If you're interested in learning more about the project, you can read my previous blog posts, or track the project on github or ohloh. I also welcome any questions, feedback, and especially patches at pjf@cpan.org.