Hacker News Reader

Comment by winrid | Hacker News Reader

What companies are still using Perl on the backend?

I know FastMail does. IMDB was in Perl before Amazon acquisition, and was told was rewritten in java over several years. Any other interesting mentions?

View on HN

Athena Health's entire backend is/was in Perl as of the mid 2010s (note: I didn't work there, only interviewed once).

PACER -- the system that runs electronic dockets and service for all federal courts runs on perl.

CPAnel is popular with shared hosting and is predominantly Perl. Companies like godaddy and eig as well as thousands of shares host still use this. Certainly a shrinking market but it has a number of years in it. Apache spamassassin is written in Perl. Other than those I rarely ever see a Perl project and if I do it was originally written in 2000.

Booking.com is known for using perl

For a company whose corporate headquarters are in the Netherlands, they sure have a pretty antimonarchist name: BooKing.com

https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/07/dutch-king-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/05/dutch-divided-...

https://dutchreview.com/news/politics/illegal-to-insult-the-...

I am not permitted to name them but there is a large company that is heavily involved in the movie industry that uses perl+Oracle quite heavily in ways I never imagined to give Hollywood execs a lot of real time data.

Fastly does -- most of its configuration management and distribution is handled by Perl applications, and the VCL templates used for most customer boilerplate is driven by Template Toolkit.

I don't want to name names, but a few prominent Perl contributors work there (yours truly included).

Any company using Proxmox [1]:

   $ dpkg -l|grep -i proxmox|awk '/perl/ { print $2}'
   libproxmox-acme-perl
   libproxmox-rs-perl
   libpve-apiclient-perl
   libpve-cluster-api-perl
   libpve-cluster-perl
   libpve-common-perl
   libpve-guest-common-perl
   libpve-http-server-perl
   libpve-storage-perl

 [1] https://proxmox.com/

I found this and read some of the code a while ago. Was very surprised it was in Perl, but makes sense I guess.

A lot of OpenSuse's infrastructure has decades old perl pieces still doing part of the work of important services.

craigslist is the first one that comes to mind

perfect

perlfect

Not strictly "backend," but Amazon, AFAIK, still runs large portions of their infra tooling on Perl.

www.spareroom.co.uk

Slashdot

The Register

BBC iPlayer, at least originally

Also I'm sure someone recently wrote a text-based MMO in Perl but I forget the name of it

Tau Station, https://taustation.space/

Large parts of the ziprecruiter website are still powered by perl.

Yahoo used it a lot, but I'm not sure if they still do.

duckduckgo?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com