Front page | perl.bootstrap |
Postings from July 2000
From: simon@brecon.co.uk [mailto:simon@brecon.co.uk] > > I encourage you - nay, I encourage *EVERYONE* - to look at glib. [...] > How many of these wheels are we prepared to reinvent? > > And, more importantly, why? Usually, portability. Assuming you mean glib which is part of the Gnome project, isn't that Unix-only? We have to consider Perl on Mac, Windows, VMS, OS/390, ... > I've been working on Unicode stuff in Perl recently, and then it dawns > on me that if I look at libunicode, all the code I need is there. It's > already done. I've been duplicating effort. That sucks. Agreed. But again, is libunicode available and supported on all platforms where Perl is? If not, are they receptive to portability patches for new platforms? And on a more people-oriented note, will those people who like to hack Perl unicode stuff, enjoy hacking on libunicode? > Perl has been so amazingly insular to date. CPAN teaches us that code > reuse is good, and that if some piece of available code doesn't meet our > needs, we refine it and send back the changes to the maintainer. If we > base a Perl 6 on libunicode and glib and iconv and whatever, I believe > we can fix their deficiencies and give the results back to their > development communities so *everyone* can benefit. As long as their development communities agree. Not everyone's goals match those of Perl. Will the glib maintainers want patches to provide VMS/Mac/... support? > It helps them, because their libraries become more efficient and more > complete. It helps us, because we can develop a lot faster. > It helps Joe Random Hacker, because, thanks to us, he's got a better > set of tools to work with. And it helps Perl PR, because "these Perl > guys are so nice, they provided a bunch of optimizations to our code". PR is a slippery subject. "Those Perl guys are working with the FSF fanatics these days, time to go to Python". Or "Those Perl guys are working with the Gnome group. Goodbye, Windows compatibility". Or "Those Perl guys are working with Microsoft. The world has ended" (remember the ActiveState conspiracy theories?) > Think it over. :) But make sure you cover all the issues :-) :-) Paul.