Punk-Queue

A durable, multi-process job queue for Perl, with a C core.

What Minion is for Mojolicious. Jobs are rows in a database, claimed
atomically by workers, run once, and recorded with their result. The
backend contract is Perl-visible but the implementations are C: SQL
assembly, bind vectors, positional row decode, the JSON codec (through
File::Raw::JSON's C ABI) and the claim state machine all live in the XS
tier, and DBI is reached from C.

    use Punk::Queue;

    my $q = Punk::Queue->new(dsn => 'dbi:SQLite:dbname=queue.db');
    $q->migrate;

    $q->task(add => sub { my ($job, $a, $b) = @_; $a + $b });

    my $id  = $q->enqueue(add => [2, 3], priority => 5);
    my $job = $q->dequeue;
    $q->perform($job);

    print $q->job_info($id)->{result}, "\n";   # 5

EVERY TASK MUST BE IDEMPOTENT

A job can run more than once. A worker can be killed between finishing the
work and recording it, and a crashed worker's job is requeued. This is the
guarantee an at-least-once queue can actually keep; write tasks that can
run twice without harm.

STATUS

Under construction, against the phased plan in ../plan_punk_queue.
Phase 1 (schema, migrations, the SQLite backend, enqueue/dequeue/perform)
is complete. PostgreSQL, the worker pool and CLI, job dependencies and
retries, the Punk plugin and cron follow in later phases. (No C ABI
ships: the once-planned pq_abi.h was dropped for having no out-of-dist
consumer - Punk::Plugin::Queue lives in this dist and needs no table.)
There is no CPAN release until phase 10.

INSTALLATION

    perl Makefile.PL
    make
    make test
    make install

REQUIREMENTS

File::Raw::JSON is required. DBI plus a driver is required at runtime for
the shipped backends: DBD::SQLite now, DBD::Pg from phase 2. Hyperman
becomes an optional dependency in phase 3 - the worker has a complete
poll(2) path without it.

SUPPORT AND DOCUMENTATION

    perldoc Punk::Queue

LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

This software is Copyright (c) 2026 by LNATION <email@lnation.org>.

This is free software, licensed under:

  The Artistic License 2.0 (GPL Compatible)