[MacPerl] Interfacing XS/C++ code with MacPerl

[Sixten.F.K.Otto.98@alum.dartmouth.org (Sixten F. K. Otto 98)]

Howdy, all.

Before I start a potentially off-topic discussion, let me first see if anyone
can point me to other information resources that might answer my questions. I
am working on a moderately sized project: a set of scripts designed to slurp a
lot of Usenet news and filter it for interesting data. Part of this involves
looking up a lot of strings in a data structure based on a trie (or radix
tree), which is currently written in Perl like the rest of the system.

I would love to have this go faster (the 9500/120 that I'm using is no slouch,
but the whole process currently takes over an hour to run, and I don't think my
code is *that* inefficient). An obvious answer is to write the trie class in
C/C++ and call out to it from the Perl code.

I have looked over all the MacPerl pages I could find, have scanned the Perl
man pages, and read the chapter from MP:P&E on building MacPerl and extensions
(which example was awfully simplistic). I've also scanned some of the less
platform-independent information. But I still cannot find much in the way of
lucid and introductory-level information about how to go about the process of
interfacing MacPerl and any C/C++ code that I might write.

So, in short, is this an appropriate forum to begin asking some of the
questions I have? Or should I attempt to find answers in the newsgroups?

For that matter, is it even possible for C/C++ code to maintain its own data
structures (create and destroy dynamic memory constructs outside of the Perl
environment)?

-= Sixten =-
... Newbie Extraordinaire...

***** Want to unsubscribe from this list?
***** Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to mac-perl-request@iis.ee.ethz.ch