About Perl

What is Perl? Features and History.

Powerful, stable, mature, portable

Perl is a highly capable, feature-rich programming language with over 36 years of development. Perl runs on over 100 platforms from portables to mainframes and is suitable for both rapid prototyping and large scale development projects.

"Perl" is a family of languages, "Raku" (formerly known as "Perl 6") is part of the family, but it is a separate language which has its own development team. Its existence has no significant impact on the continuing development of "Perl".

White papers: Technical Showcases

White papers of Perl technology at your disposal.

Perl features

Mission critical

Used for mission critical projects in the public and private sectors.

Object-oriented, procedural and functional

Supports object-oriented, procedural and functional programming.

Easily extendible

There are over 25,000 open source modules available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN).

Text manipulation

Perl includes powerful tools for processing text that make it ideal for working with HTML, XML, and all other mark-up and natural languages.

Unicode support

Supports Unicode version 13 (from Perl 5.32).

Database integration

Perl's database integration interface (DBI) supports third-party databases including Oracle, Sybase, Postgres, MySQL and many others.

C/C++ library interface

Perl interfaces with external C/C++ libraries through XS or SWIG.

Embeddable

The Perl interpreter can be embedded into other systems such as web servers and database servers.

Open Source

Perl is Open Source software, licensed under its Artistic License, or the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Perl and the Web

Ideal web programming language

Perl is an ideal web programming language due to its text manipulation capabilities and rapid development cycle.

Web Frameworks

There are many web frameworks written in Perl, a leading one is Catalyst.

Database integration

Perl's DBI package makes web-database integration easy. DBIx::Class - is available as an Object Relational Mapper.

Web modules

CPAN offers thousands of modules, so almost any task you need to accomplish will be made easier, from URL or image manipulation, to Amazon EC2 APIs and much more.

Duct-tape of the internet, and more...

Perl has long been known as "the duct-tape of the Internet", however many large web based applications are also written solely in Perl.

Encryption capable

Perl can handle encrypted Web data, including e-commerce transactions.

Embed into Apache

Perl can be embedded into web servers to speed up processing by as much as 2000%, mod_perl allows the Apache web server to embed a Perl interpreter.