Parsing Perl Without Perl: A Rust LSP for Perl

​Steven Zimmerman will give a talk about the Rust Perl Language Server + parser toolkit that he's developed.

​Perl parses Perl by running Perl. That’s the trick nobody else can pull off, and it’s why Perl tooling either leans on a runtime (with the install friction and latency that implies) or gives up on the hard cases.

​It started by trying to build a tree-sitter-compatible AST for Perl in Rust after tree-sitter-perl kept breaking our internal AST context-packing tooling. Pest looked like the obvious way to get there. That lasted one week before it hit a backtracking wall. A year and 600,000 lines of Rust later, we had most of a Perl compiler front-end: lexer, parser, AST, scope resolution, symbol tables, method resolution order. Everything Perl does at parse time. Nothing it does at runtime.

​This talk walks through what broke, what worked, and where honest static analysis stops on a language that can rewrite itself at runtime.

​Native binary. No Perl install required for IDE features.

​See more on github here: /EffortlessMetrics/perl-lsp

​Steven Zimmerman, CPA. Former CFO in PE-backed companies and former Senior Editor at XDA. Builds verification infrastructure for agentic development, focused on trusted change and protecting senior developer attention.

​This will be a Zoom session that will be uploaded to Youtube afterwards.