While they don't all work on the core, development on each perl release is very healthy. From Perl 5.14.0 release delta: Perl 5.14.0 represents one year of dev

While they don't all work on the core, development on each perl release is very healthy. From Perl 5.14.0 release delta: Perl 5.14.0 represents one year of development since Perl 5.12.0 and contains nearly 550,000 lines of changes across nearly 3,000 files from 150 authors and committers. ref: https://metacpan.org/module/perl5140delta https://metacpan.org/module/perl5140delta And since the 5.14.0 release on 14th May this year development has continued unabated: Current release (5.14) * 5.14.1 on 2011-06-17 * 5.14.2 on 2011-09-26 Patch old release (5.12) * 5.12.4 on 2011-06-20 Development for next release (5.16) * 5.15.0 on 2011-06-20 * 5.15.1 on 2011-07-20 * 5.15.2 on 2011-08-21 * 5.15.3 on 2011-09-21 * 5.15.4 on 2011-10-20 ref: Above dates from MetaCPAN and excludes release candidates versions.