(Migrated from bootstrap)
2000-07-24-10:17:54 Dan Sugalski:
> Perl 6 will most *definitely* be an embedded perl. Easy and clean
> embedding is one of my primary goals. A small core with extended
> functionality provided by non-core things is a secondary one. (And
> one very much dependent on the updated language design in many
> ways).
Cool! I've got only one gripe with perl as it stands now, and that's
mostly at higher layers: it's not practical to make something like
"use Fatal" that really works, so I can stop typing " or die ..."
all the time. Probably has little to do with the proposed new core
architecture, but evicting stuff from the core and keeping it
outside in modules will likely make it possible to address this as
a happy side-effect --- AFAIK the barriers to doing this right now
are mostly associated with eccentric weirdness in the way the most
often-used syscalls (esp. write(2)) are accessed by most
programmers. The whole irregularity of the I/O system.
But there's a big niche that perl currently fails to occupy, and it
would _Rock_ if this architectural redesign could leave it more fit
for this niche.
There are many places where a teensy executable footprint and
breathtakingly fast performance are dominant design requirements.
Lua is seeing a lot of interest for these achievements, and Qscheme
looks awfully interesting too. If we could boil down a heart-of-perl
core that could fit into the runtime limits of PalmOS that would
be a killer achievement, even if few people actually used it. If
it were easy to build a perl interpreter that could start up so
quickly that we could boot procmail out of the arena for a filtering
mail delivery program, that gets executed once for every message
delivered, that'd be stunningly spiffy. The lengths that Mailagent
has to go to, to try and allow email filtering in perl without
clobbering the mail server, are just plain ugly as sin.
Mutt is my favourite MUA. On the mutt-dev list recently, Simon
Cozens offered to embed perl in mutt. I suggested that while some
might like it, I'd probably prefer something else, even though perl
is far and away my favourite language; I offered the mental image of
"a small terrier with a swollen and distended belly, looks like it
has swallowed a beach ball, lying on its side and groaning."
-Bennett
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