How to build nvim to has_perl?

Question

I am on macOS. My ultimate goal is to speed up dbext.vim and I found the page mentioned DBI which depends on has('perl').

So I'd like to know how to build Neovim to have Perl enabled... Now I am using a neovim which was installed by brew install neovim but it seems I have to build from sources to enable Perl.

I am also interested in the way how Deoplete made my nvim has('python3') from 0 to 1 and didn't require a rebuild.

Last but not least.. How do other plugins achieve Async operations? I may see if it is possible to make dbext.vim run async so I will be less mindful of its speed...

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Neovim is always compiled with all the features, so rebuilding won't help you: Perl support simply isn't included in the version of Neovim you are running. See (:help feature-compile, :help nvim-features-missing).

However, later versions of Neovim do include Perl support, so upgrading will add this feature for you.

As for your other question about Python, not all features require a re-compile to be enabled (see :help feature-list). has('python3') returns whether the Python 3 API is currently available, not whether it was compiled in. (Which it was: see above.)

Asynchronous operations are performed using "jobs". See :help job-control.

Answer 2

Update: neovim now (January 2020) supports perl as well as has('perl'). I update neovim very often to the latest development version, and I only noticed the feature today when running checkhealth. If you are using a stable version of neovim, you probably will not see support for perl yet.