The Problems of Perl: The Future of Bugzilla

Once upon a time, Bugzilla was an internal application at Netscape, written in TCL. When it was open-sourced in 1998, Terry (the original programmer), decided to re-write Bugzilla in Perl. My understanding is that he re-wrote it in Perl because a lot of system administrators know Perl, so that would make it easier to get contributors.

In 1998, there were few advanced, object-oriented web scripting languages. In fact, Perl was pretty much it. PHP was at version 3.0, python was at version 1.5, Java was just starting to become well-known, ruby was almost unheard of, and some people were still writing their CGI scripts in C or C++.

Perl has many great features, most of all the number of libraries available and the extreme flexibility of the language.

However, Perl would not be my first choice for writing or maintaining a large project, such as Bugzilla. The same flexibility that makes Perl so powerful makes it very difficult to enforce code quality standards or to implement modern object-oriented designs. Here are the problems:

• Reviewing Perl code takes much longer than reviewing other languages. Here's why:
  • There are many ways to do the same thing in Perl. It's even the motto: "There's More Than One Way To Do It." However, this means that each reviewer must enforce very strict code guidlines on each coder, or must learn each coder's coding style. In the interest of consistency, we usually pick the former. This takes more reviewer time. It's also frustrating for contributors who are used to writing in a particular fashion.
  • More ways to write the same thing means there are many more bad ways to write code in Perl than there are in other languages. In any language it's possible to do stupid things and not realize it. In Perl it's easy. Or even when the code does what you mean it to, just because it works doesn't mean it's good. My experience is that Perl encourages people to write code that "just works," but might not be architected appropriately. Once again, this is possible in any language, but I think Perl makes it easier than other languages to write bad code.
  • It's very easy to make Perl code hard to read. It uses strange variables like $_. It relies heavily on complex regular expressions. I don't think anybody would argue that Perl encourages readability.
• Perl lacks many of the features that implement what computer scientists call "design by contract." That is, Perl doesn't enforce things. For example, Perl doesn't check the type of arguments to subroutines. You can't make subroutines private in a class. Programmers have to actually read the documentation to know that a function is really "private" or "protected." Perl doesn't have real assertions. (The "assert" command in C, Python, Java, or various other languages.)

  Perl's lack of enforcement is a nice feature for the casual programmer, but for the design of large applications, you want the programming langugae itself to do as much error-checking for you as possible, so that you don't have to write the error-checking yourself.

• Perl lacks a real exception mechanism. We would have to write our own if we want one.
• Under mod_perl, because of the design of Perl, Apache processes grow HUGE in size. We kill them if they get up to 70MB, but even 40MB for a single Apache process is too big. The fact that Perl never releases memory back to the kernel is a problem.
• Without some experience, it can be difficult to read Perl's compiler error messages and actually then determine what's wrong.

Since 1998 there have been many advances in programming languages. PHP has decent object-oriented features, python has many libraries and excellent syntax, Java has matured a lot, and Ruby is coming up in the world quickly.

Nowadays, almost all of our competitors have one advantage: they are not written in perl. They can actually develop features more quickly than we can, not because of the number of contributors they have, but because the language they're using allows it. There are at least two bug-trackers that I can think of off the top of my head that didn't even exist in 1998 and were developed rapidly up to a point where they could compete with Bugzilla.

However, honestly, I like Bugzilla better than all of our competitors. We have almost 10 years of experience writing a bug tracker. We know what people need and want from bug-tracking software.

But still, any of you long-term contributors to Bugzilla who also have experience in other languages, ask yourself this question: "In all the time I've spent working on Bugzilla in Perl, how far could I have gotten on writing another bug tracker, from SCRATCH, in another language?" My personal estimate is that I could have entirely re-written Bugzilla in Python or Ruby in half the time I've been working on it in Perl. (That would be re-writing it in a year and a half, not an unreasonable amount of time for 80,000 lines of code or so.)

Nowadays, even the virtue of "lots of system administrators speak Perl" is fading. New admins are more likely to know Python than Perl. And in about two years from now, I'll bet people will be just as likely to know Ruby. Perl will continue to fade in popularity, I suspect. Already there's no doubt that far more people know PHP than know Perl.

So the popularity argument is dead.

One advantage that Perl has is CPAN. There are a lot of libraries available. But then again, that's also a problem that Perl has--people need to install SO MANY modules just to use Bugzilla. Witness all the protesting there is from our users whenever we add new required modules to Bugzilla, and the support questions we get about problems with CPAN.

And even that advantage is fading. There are a lot of python modules available now. Java has Jakarta and a lot of other modules. And Ruby has RubyGems, which are even easier to install than CPAN modules. PHP has PEAR, which is also very nice.

In 1998, Perl was the right choice for a language to re-write Bugzilla in. In 2007, though, having worked with Perl extensively for years on the Bugzilla project, I'd say the language itself is our greatest hinderance.

But what can we do about it? ohloh.net says that we have 43,762 lines of code in Bugzilla, and I think we might even have twice that many, if you count templates. Not to mention POD.

I think that the experience of Netscape and the Mozilla Project shows us that re-writing Bugzilla from scratch and totally ignoring our old code base would be a bad idea. If we stopped development for a year and a half, we'd be hopelessly behind and our users would start to abandon us in droves.

As far as I can see, if we want to move away from Perl and move to a language that will be better for us as time goes on, we have two choices:

1. Figure out a way to re-write *parts* of Bugzilla in another language without affecting performance or greatly adding to the complexity of installation. We could then incrementally move to another language.
2. Work on both projects at once--a small team working on the re-write in another language, and the same team we have now working on the current Perl version, up until version 3.4 or 3.6.

If #1 is possible, I think I'd obviously prefer that. However, if it would be extremely difficult or be somehow bad for the project overall, then we could do #2.

No matter which way we go, these are the steps we'd have to go through:

1. Make a list of every single feature of Bugzilla that would have to be re-written in a new version.
2. Using this list, decide on a language to use that would be the easiest and best for implementing all of those features. We could also decide if we want to use a web framework like Rails (Ruby) or Pylons (Python) to eliminate us having to write some code. After all, the less code we have to write, the better.

   I've already been experimenting with various languages, and I've started a page that compares their advantages and disadvantages, from Bugzilla's perspective.

3. Prototype some basic features of Bugzilla in that language, to see how easy it actually is.
4. Prioritize the feature list of Bugzilla, to figure out what we have to re-implement in what order.
5. Do some design of the system so that it makes sense and is coherent when it's done. We don't have to re-design Bugzilla at this point--we could get stuck in that forever. And we shouldn't design it by committee. One or two people should work on the design, and then present it to others for review.

   However, no matter what the design is, it's important to maintain feature and API parity with the current Perl Bugzilla--otherwise it will be very hard to get users and extensions to upgrade.

6. Start work, based on the design and the priority list.

Without taking some action, I'm not sure how many more years Bugzilla can stay alive as a product. Currently, our popularity is actually *increasing*, as far as I can see. So we shouldn't abandon what we're doing now. But I'm seeing more and more products come into the bug-tracking arena, and I'm not sure that we can stay competetive for more than a few more years if we are stuck with Perl.