Simon Cozens wrote:
> Larry has guaranteed that Perl 6 will be built "out of the same source tree"
> as Perl 5.
Whatever that means... i.e. not much.
> This is a major win for us in two areas. Firstly, we can reuse the
> information determined by Perl 5's Configure process to help make Perl 6
> portable: for instance, I expect we'll still be using the [UI](8|16|32|V)
> typedefs to guarantee integer sizes.
Yeuch. So now we have to maintain two interdependent hairballs. Is
that really progress?
> Secondly and more importantly, it guarantees that we've got a copy of Perl on
> hand before Perl 6 is built. This allows us to reduce the level of
> preprocessor muddling by effectively generating the C source to Perl 6 from
> templates and preprocessing. For instance, I expect to see a little macro
> language develop for specifying vtable methods, which, when preprocessed,
> would also generate the vtables and their corresponding enums. I'd also like
> to see Perl choose whether or not a function should invoke the native C
> library's implementation or define its own.
>
> What do people think?
I think macro languages suck, whether they are the C macro preprocessor,
or some fancy dohickey that we knock together. I think that having to
have perl5 around to build perl6 also sucks. For example, in our case
we build perl5 every night with the rest of Solaris. It already takes
too long. Adding a build of perl5 just to build perl6 - well, forget
it.
Alan Burlison
