Hello OTel community. I've had one or two conversations with organizations interested in using a Perl implementation of OpenTelemetry. This issue is to gauge interest in maintaining a Perl implementation.

Since newcomers may be reading this issue, here's brief overview of the components that an OpenTelemetry client is composed of:

• API: the public interfaces used by developers to instrument their code. At runtime, the API can be bound to an implementation. By default, the API provides a no-op implementation. The SDK and a mock/test implementation are the two other common implementations.
• SDK: a official implementation, which follows the SDK spec. The SDK is a framework which consists of plugin interfaces for Exporters, SpanProcessors, etc.
• SDK Plugins: official implementations of common plugins, such as Zipkin, Prometheus, and OTLP exporters.
• Instrumentation Libraries: packages which use the API to provide instrumentation for HTTP clients, databases, web frameworks, and other common libraries.
• Semantic Conventions: Constants and helpers which ensure that instrumentation libraries produce consistent data across different languages.

All of the nitty-gritty details can be found in the OpenTelemetry Specification.

At minimum, this group would need to do the following:

• Define the OpenTelemetry API and Semantic Conventions in Perl, following the spec.
• Define an installation mechanism for the OpenTelemetry SDK, plugins, and instrumentation libraries
  • In some languages we try to automate installation, but that is not a requirement.
• Help the community maintain instrumentation for common Perl libraries.

The group would also need to pick one of two approaches to maintaining an SDK implementation:

• Maintain an SDK and the required SDK plugins in Perl.
• Maintain an FFI bridge to another SDK implementation, such as C++. I believe that SWIG and Perl XS are the available FFI options.

The FFI approach may be attractive, as maintaining a production ready SDK represents a lot of work. But I'm not a Perl expert and I don't know what kinds of disadvantages a FFI implementation may come with.

If anyone has interest in contributing to this effort, please introduce yourself! Questions are welcome.