Folks, I know everyone's got their own opinions on yanking functions (or not) from the core interpreter image, but I'd like to remind everyone that this is the *internals* list, not the language list. Our primary purpose is to build a system that runs Perl fast and provides a platform others can leverage off of to make perl run other places. Structural changes made here should (one might go so far as to say must) be completely invisible to your average programmer writing a perl program. If it's decreed that fork is just there without having to do something special, then it will be no matter what magic needs to be done. Whether a particular function or set of functions (heck, even all the functions) is linked directly into the main interpreter image or loaded in on demand is an implementation detail, and one that should be irrelevant to pretty much everyone but us and those intrepid souls that will write guts-level code. If it turns out to be a win here behind hte curtain, great. If it isn't that's fine too--we just won't do it. And if we later decide it was a nice idea that didn't work then we can change it. Our goals are: *) Make perl run fast *) Make Perl portable *) Build a codebase that we don't have to overhaul again for a while We have some time here. We can (and will, I expect) just try it as part of one of the alpha or pre-alpha releases. If performance is unacceptable then we'll fix it, and if we can't fix it well enough then we just won't do it. It's far to early to get so... enthusiastic about it, though. Dan --------------------------------------"it's like this"------------------- Dan Sugalski even samurai [EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even teddy bears get drunk