Have you considered POE? (Learning POE is on my to-do list.)

Or if other languages are an option and this needs to scale out to a large number of connections, have you considered Erlang/OTP? (Which, as I currently understand, effectively hides a multi-threaded event loop in the language runtime, but more-or-less forces you into a message-passing functional programming paradigm as a result. I have heard good things about it but have not yet used it for a non-trivial program myself.)

Those are good thoughts. I did quite a bit of POE back in the day. I don’t think I’ve used it in… 15 years? Which, strangely enough, was the same time I tried to pick up some Erlang. I failed. :P Partly because that was exactly when Perl got back up with Catalyst, DBIC, Plack… So I stopped needing to branch out.

POE isn’t a good match for the project. Javascript is probably the best fit for the stuff I’m trying to do right now with the explosion of promise/wait/async stuff in the core and Typescript and such. In fact, I rewrote a bunch of JS in Perl for my newest client because there is no Perl lib but plenty in other languages… :( The code is doing a LOT of other things though and I’m quite solid in Perl and a bit of a behind-the-times dilettante in JS. I’ve already prototyped something like 10 clients and a few dozen approaches and can jump in and out of testing approaches and such because of my familiarity with Perl… and I think it still is the best munging/prototyping language, maybe by a lot.