TL;DR

JSON::PP is a CORE module in Perl since some time now…

I’ve always been fond of CORE modules in Perl because not always I have access to easy installing of modules from CPAN and not always I can use Docker to pack everything as I need. So… it’s just easy to assume that the module will be there. Unless you’re using RedHat, of course.

JSON files are super-handy to manage configurations and it might not be widely known that JSON::PP is in CORE since some time:

$ corelist JSON::PP
...
JSON::PP was first released with perl v5.13.9

Considering that release 5.14 dates back to May 2011… it’s more than 9 years!

Maybe the pure perl implementation will not be what you need for a super-fast API, but for the casual reading or generation of a JSON file it does the trick.

In my opinion… an unsung hero.

Update: E. Choroba correctly points out that we have to look for changing fine-prints - take a look at this video. I still think that JSON::PP is an unsung hero… for simple configuration files 😅