Piledriver is a backwards compatible fork of Perl 5. Its goals are...

• To be 100% backwards compatible.
• Make rapid advances to the language using good ideas from CPAN.
• To be welcoming to new developers.

Piledriver draws its inspiration from perl5i. Its major feature improvements will aim to bring good ideas from CPAN in as core features. This will probably include...

• Core functions that throw exceptions (similar to autodie)
• Moose-style objects
• Everything is an object
• Better file handling (similar to Path::Tiny)
• Better date handling (similar to DateTime)
• Better default behaviors, less gotchas
• Less global variables
• More built in data utilities, less CPAN modules to install

Piledriver also aims to expand who can and wants to work on the Perl 5 core language by...

• Having better documentation about how to contribute.
• Making it simpler to contribute.
• Reducing the complexity of the code.
• Using well-understood services and tools such as Github and Travis.
• Having a well behaved, principled community.
• Acknowleding the importance of non-code contributions.
• Reducing the risk of adding new features to the language.

Piledriver is 100% backwards compatible with Perl 5, you can safely run your existing Perl 5 code on Piledriver. Features will be turned on a block by block basis allowing even old, crufty projects to transition.

# This is Perl 5
open my $fh, "<", $file or die "Can't open $file for reading: $!";

{
    # This is Piledriver (except this doesn't work yet)
    use piledriver v1;
    my $fh = $file->path->openr;
}

We have our own wiki and issue tracker. Right now the focus is on getting exceptions working as our first stable feature, but if you have an idea you'd like to see worked on, let us know!

Currently the project is just getting started. There are no releases and no complete features.