The first lines of source code were added to Perl in 1987. Projects with recent activity, and a code base more than five years old are likely solving vital problems and delivering consistent value, and may be organized to reward sustained effort by an engaged team of contributors.
Such a lengthy source control history in conjunction with recent activity may indicate that this code base and community are important enough to attract long-term commitment, and may also indicate a mature and relatively bug-free code base.
Note: The source code for Perl might actually be older than the source control history can reveal. Many new projects begin by incorporating a large amount of source code from existing, older projects. You might be able to tell whether this is the case by looking for a rapid rise in the amount of code early in the project's history.
Over the past twelve months, 68 developers contributed new code to Perl. This is one of the largest open-source teams in the world, and is in the top 2% of all project teams on Open Hub.
For this measurement, Open Hub considers only recent changes to the code. Over the entire history of the project, 1411 developers have contributed.
Perl is written mostly in C.
Across all C projects on Open Hub, 18% of all source code lines are comments.
For Perl, this figure is 8%.This lack of comments puts Perl among the lowest one-third of all C projects on Open Hub.
A high number of comments might indicate that the code is well-documented and organized, and could be a sign of a helpful and disciplined development team.
Over the last twelve months, Perl has not seen any change in activity. This may be a good sign, and an indication that development is continuing at the same pace and not dropping off.
Open Hub makes this determination by comparing the total number of commits made by all developers during the most recent twelve months with the same figure for the prior twelve months. The number of developers and total lines of code are not considered.