well, ctags is quite independent, extendebal and universaly used. But AFAIS it relies on regex-patterns, which is to limited for perl... but better than nothing.

By intuition I think perl-parsing needs to compile the code like flymake-mode in emacs does to find syntax errors. (hmmm...does it?)

But the "IDE-logic" per module should be supplied by the module/submodule. This way one could decide which module to use dependend on it's IDE support.

> Regarding exporting, I think that just declaring method names would be too limited for some uses.

of course not, the intention of the OP is just a peace of the spektrum. : )

Cheers