I wrote Object::Adhoc recently which is pretty similar.

my $obj = object { foo => 1, bar => 2 };
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Main differences are that mine doesn't work recursively, and mine also generates has_foo methods.

If you need nested objects, my solution would be to just be explicit:

my $connection = object {
  client => object { address => '10.0.0.1', port => 20001 },
  server => object { address => '10.0.0.2', port =>    25 },
};

say $connection->server->address;
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As far as adding things like constructors and methods, I consider that beyond the scope of Object::Adhoc; use a proper class builder for that. Object::Adhoc is just for those cases where you want a sub to return something dict/struct-like.

object { ... } is conceptually a quote-like operator.