The Perl and Raku Conference in Houston

Vendors aren’t rushing to write Perl bindings for their fancy new libraries anymore, but Alien and FFI can help make it easier for Perl developers to do it themselves. I’m going to talk about how I used these technologies and built some new ones to bring NewRelic into the Perl ecosystem.

This talk will describe the process in detail of taking an external non-Perl library and making it work in the Perl ecosystem using Alien and FFI::Platypus. Most software vendors today are no longer providing bindings for Perl anymore. For example at Fastly we wanted to monitor one of our internal Perl applications using NewRelic. The only existing Perl bindings were based on a beta product that had never been supported, so I set about writing my own. I will show how I did this by leveraging existing technology, as well as writing some new tools for handing C structured data. I will also cover some other FFI library bindings and in the tradition of Open Source show how my NewRelic bindings were extended by others.