Some of the crown jewels of CPAN that have been ported to other dynamic languages leave quite a bit to be desired. For instance, last time I was helping a friend with a scraper I was really disappointed in brokenness of the Python port of WWW::Mechanize, and found the Ruby port to be incomplete for my friend's task. Eventually I wrote the parser for him myself and directed him toward another friend who was fluent in Python and Perl who could show him the ropes with Scrapy if he wanted to rewrite it later.
True - there's nothing exactly like www::mechanize, but really, you can usually write what you want with scrapy, beautifulsoup, html5lib, any of the tree/xpath implementations, etc. (I know, because I did, writing a quick form processor + wrapper for common functions in <1k lines for my page scraping needs)
You will rarely find an exact port of some other foreign library that will work exactly like you expected the original to work. That goes both ways - for example there's loads of async frameworks in python, but it's really hard to find a good one in perl. Sure - there's AnyEvent and POE, but they're just bizarre monsters compared to much cleaner simple solutions like diesel. There's Coro... but that's a longer topic than I'm willing to discuss here ;)
Yes it is. Unlike viraptor I've been using Coro (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Coro/) successfully in production without any hitches and have services (including web apps) that are still running after 2 years without a reboot.
Yeah - definitely, if you can make it work for you. I just run into some situations where I expected it to do a context switch in async block but it didn't seem to (locked up instead)... I couldn't find the reason. Maybe it was my fault, or maybe just some tricky bit was missing from the docs - I don't know. Python-diesel is my default so I just went back instead of digging for the solution too much.
