Re: [MacPerl] Perl Shared Library (was Re: [MacPerl] ports and builds)

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 11.51 -0500 1999.01.19, David Steffen wrote:
>1) For what tasks is MacPerl primarily being targetted?

Any and all, aside from low-level stuff like drivers.


>2) What will MacOS X be like; e.g. will it make MacPerl as it currently
>exists irrelevant?

No (speaking from what I have been able to gather about how this is all
going to work).  At least, the way I have seen it for some time is that in
the "boxes" that allow it, you will probably use Unix perl, but where it
does not, you will use MacPerl.  MacPerl will be able to run in the Blue
Box.  perl will run in the BSD environment.  Both will likely run in the
Yellow Box environment, since it can access BSD stuff and once MacPerl is
ported to Carbon, that should run, too.  So MacPerl might not be very
useful under the Yellow Box, but might be very useful in the Blue Box.


>1) I absolutely rely on MacPerl for lots of ad hoc text processing tasks.

Who doesn't?  :)

>2) I built one rather large package for a client in MacPerl.  It sure was
>not a classic, polished Mac application, but this was a technical package
>for technical users, and that was acceptable.  In this case, preinstalling
>MacPerl on their hardware was no problem.  By the way, I made heavy use of
>droplets and the client found that to be a very satisfactory interface for
>the package.

This kind of thing MacPerl is very good at, IMO.


>3) I do NOT use MacPerl for CGIs.  Partly this is because I don't like the
>Mac as a server (it is too unstable, in my hands) but in fact I *am*
>running a website on a Mac, and, with one small exception, am not using
>MacPerl CGI's.  This is because of the limitation of being able to run but
>a single MacPerl thread.

Yes, and this is an important problem to solve.


>4) I have not used MacPerl for GUI work.  I have played a bit with the new
>toolbox stuff, and I may yet complete a GUI package using it, but frankly,
>if I was going to go to that much trouble, I suspect I might just as well
>do the thing in Codeworks and C.  To tell you the truth, I miss the old
>Microsoft Basic for the Mac; it made GUI on a Mac quick and easy.  Again,
>what you ended up with was less than a classic Mac app, but where that was
>acceptable, it made it possible to knock something together very fast.

MacPerl does need some work in this area, but certainly it seems to be much
easier to do it in MacPerl than in C.  There are still some problems with
it, but I imagine things there will get better going forward.

Of course, in the Yellow Box in Mac OS X, we will all be installing
ObjectivePerl from TipTop and accessing the NeXT APIs directly through that.

    http://www.tiptop.com/

Well, maybe we won't.  But I am certainly going to test it out as soon as
Mac OS X comes out.

--
Chris Nandor          mailto:pudge@pobox.com         http://pudge.net/
%PGPKey = ('B76E72AD', [1024, '0824090B CE73CA10  1FF77F13 8180B6B6'])

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