Perl logo

Perl

Highly capable, feature-rich programming language with over 26 years of development
4.3K
927
+ 1
574

What is Perl?

Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, GUI development, and more.
Perl is a tool in the Languages category of a tech stack.
Perl is an open source tool with 1.8K GitHub stars and 510 GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Perl's open source repository on GitHub

Who uses Perl?

Companies
808 companies reportedly use Perl in their tech stacks, including Amazon, Booking.com, and ROBLOX.

Developers
1012 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Perl.

Perl Integrations

Sentry, Rollbar, Cloudinary, uWSGI, and IBM DB2 are some of the popular tools that integrate with Perl. Here's a list of all 37 tools that integrate with Perl.
Pros of Perl
72
Lots of libraries
66
Open source
61
Text processing
54
Powerful
49
Unix-style
47
Regex
37
Stable
32
Concise syntax
29
Hackerish
22
Easy to use
15
Swiss army chainsaw
13
Code Less Do More
12
CPAN
9
Freedom
8
All purpose
5
Many ways to do it
5
Familiar
5
Readability
5
Community
4
Modular
4
Smart (does alot for you)
4
Object-Oriented
3
Postmodern
3
It's the best one-off task language
2
For a man
2
Good man pages
1
Auto case variables
1
Single Source Library (CPAN)
1
Multi-threaded support
1
Hashes
1
C-style
1
Multiparadigm
Decisions about Perl

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Perl in their tech stack.

Needs advice
on
GolangGolangPerlPerl
and
RustRust

I intend to use a programming language which I'll use as AWS runtime and write a script that will comb through tons of files in a directory and its subdirectories and search for simple text regular expressions and process and write the matches in a file as output. I have heard that Perl is good for regex based search but I also want the performance to be good as it will have to go through tons of files for IO. In this post: https://filia-aleks.medium.com/aws-lambda-battle-2021-performance-comparison-for-all-languages-c1b441005fd1, I see that Rust works well as AWS Lambda runtime with very good performance. Which one should I choose as my AWS lambda runtime for this problem? Golang is also an option as it is fast as per the above link.

See more

Blog Posts

Perl Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Perl?
PHP
Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.
Ruby
Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.
C lang
Java
Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!
Python
Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.
See all alternatives

Perl's Followers
927 developers follow Perl to keep up with related blogs and decisions.