why public-inbox is currently implemented in Perl 5
---------------------------------------------------

While Perl has many detractors and there's a lot not to like
about Perl, we use it anyways because it offers benefits not
(yet) available from other languages.

This document is somewhat inspired by https://sqlite.org/whyc.html

Other languages and runtimes may eventually be a possibility
for us, and this document can serve as our requirements list
for possible replacements.

As always, comments and corrections and additions welcome at
<meta@public-inbox.org>.  We're not Perl experts, either.

Good Things
-----------

* Availability

  Perl 5 is installed on many, if not most GNU/Linux and
  BSD-based servers and workstations.  It is likely the most
  widely-installed programming environment that offers a
  significant amount of POSIX functionality.  Users won't
  have to waste bandwidth or space with giant toolchains or
  architecture-specific binaries.

  Furthermore, Perl documentation is typically installed
  locally as manpages, allowing users to quickly refer
  to documentation as needed.

* Scripted, always editable by the end user

  Users cannot lose access to the source code.  Code written
  entirely in any scripting language automatically satisfies
  the GPL-2.0, making it easier to satisfy the AGPL-3.0.

  Use of a scripting language improves auditability for
  malicious changes.  It also reduces storage and bandwidth
  requirements for distributors, as the same scripts can be
  shared across multiple OSes and architectures.

  Perl's availability and the low barrier to entry of
  scripting ensures it's easy for users to exercise their
  software freedom.

* Predictable performance

  While Perl is neither fast or memory-efficient, its
  performance and memory use are predictable and does not
  require GC tuning by the user.

  public-inbox is developed for (and mostly on) old
  hardware.  Perl was fast enough to power the web of the
  late 1990s, and any cheap VPS today has more than enough
  RAM and CPU for handling plain-text email.

  Low hardware requirements increases the reach of our software
  to more users, improving centralization resistance.

* Compatibility

  Unlike similarly powerful scripting languages, there is no
  forced migration to a major new version.  From 2000-2020,
  Perl had fewer breaking changes than Python or Ruby; we
  expect that trend to continue given the inertia of Perl 5.

  As of April 2021, the Perl Steering Committee has confirmed
  Perl 7 will require `use v7.0' and existing code should
  continue working unchanged:
  https://nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/259789
  <CAMvkq_SyTKZD=1=mHXwyzVYYDQb8Go0N0TuE5ZATYe_M4BCm-g@mail.gmail.com>

* Built for text processing

  Our focus is plain-text mail, and Perl has many built-ins
  optimized for text processing.  It also has good support
  for UTF-8 and legacy encodings found in old mail archives.

* Integration with distros and non-Perl libraries

  Perl modules and bindings to common libraries such as
  SQLite and Xapian are already distributed by many
  GNU/Linux distros and BSD ports.

  There should be no need to rely on language-specific
  package managers such as cpan(1), those systems increase
  the learning curve for users and systems administrators.

* Compactness and terseness

  Less code generally means less bugs.  We try to avoid the
  "line noise" stereotype of some Perl codebases, yet still
  manage to write less code than one would with
  non-scripting languages.

* Performance ceiling and escape hatch

  With optional Inline::C, we can be "as fast as C" in some
  cases.  Inline::C is widely-packaged by distros and it
  gives us an escape hatch for dealing with missing bindings
  or performance problems should they arise.  Inline::C use
  (as opposed to XS) also preserves the software freedom and
  auditability benefits to all users.

  Unfortunately, most C toolchains are big; so Inline::C
  will always be optional for users who cannot afford the
  bandwidth or space.


Bad Things
----------

* Slow startup time.  Tokenization, parsing, and compilation of
  pure Perl is not cached.  Inline::C does cache its results,
  however.

  We work around slow startup times in tests by preloading
  code, similar to how mod_perl works for CGI.

* High space overhead and poor locality of small data
  structures, including the optree.  This may not be fixable
  in Perl itself given compatibility requirements of the C API.

  These problems are exacerbated on modern 64-bit platforms,
  though the Linux x32 ABI offers promise.

* Lack of vectored I/O support (writev, sendmmsg, etc. syscalls)
  and "newer" POSIX functions in general.  APIs end up being
  slurpy, favoring large buffers and memory copies for
  concatenation rather than rope (aka "cord") structures.

* While mmap(2) is available via PerlIO::mmap, string ops
  (m//, substr(), index(), etc.) still require memory copies
  into userspace, negating a benefit of zero-copy.

* The XS/C API make it difficult to improve internals while
  preserving compatibility.

* Lack of optional type checking.  This may be a blessing in
  disguise, though, as it encourages us to simplify our data
  models and lowers cognitive overhead.

* SMP support is mostly limited to fork(), since many
  libraries (including much of the standard library) are not
  thread-safe.  Even with threads.pm, sharing data between
  interpreters within the same process is inefficient due to
  the lack of lock-free and wait-free data structures from
  projects such as Userspace RCU.

* Process spawning speed degrades as memory use increases.
  We work around this optionally via Inline::C and vfork(2),
  since Perl lacks an approximation of posix_spawn(3).

  We also use `undef' and `delete' ops to free large buffers
  as soon as we're done using them to save memory.


Red herrings to ignore when evaluating other runtimes
-----------------------------------------------------

These don't discount a language or runtime from being
being used, they're just not interesting.

* Lightweight threading

  While lightweight threading implementations are
  convenient, they tend to be significantly heavier than a
  pure event-loop systems (or multi-threaded event-loop
  systems)

  Lightweight threading implementations have stack overhead
  and growth typically measured in kilobytes.  The userspace
  state overhead of event-based systems is an order of
  magnitude less, and a sunk cost regardless of concurrency
  model.
