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

[David Steffen <steffen@biomedcomp.com>]

Thanks to all of you for your helpful comments!  Specifically:

In response to my question:

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

Rich Morin said:

>Not as long as Mac OS 8.X exists!

Is OS 8.X likely to be a supported, active, developing environment once OS
X is released?

>Also, there are some interesting ways
>in which MacPerl technology might slip into a Mac OS X version of Perl.
>For instance, regular Perl knows nothing about the Toolbox...

How relevant will the Toolbox be under OS X?

and Chris Nandor said:

>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, thanks for the pointer to tiptop - a very interesting organization.
What I hear you saying here is that under OS X, the value of a separate
MacPerl may diminish, and that has been my impression.  If OS X is really
Unix, then by using Perl one will have the ability to run multiple Perl
scripts at the same time and (presumably) each Perl script will have the
ability to run multiple threads.

In response to my question:

>>For what tasks is MacPerl primarily being targetted?

Chris Nandor said:

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

Really?  I know that this is the party line, and I certainly respect your
experience with MacPerl and acknowledge that it is much greater than mine,
but my experience is that at present this is not realistic.  I would
certainly not use the current version of MacPerl to develop a commercial
application, for example.  (By commercial I mean a standalone program sold
in a box at Computer City.  As I already mentioned, I do use MacPerl to
develop (for $$) custom software where the requirements of seamlessness are
reduced.)

Rich Morin said:

>Well, _I_ use it for automating all sorts of tasks on my Mac.  And,
>because I'd like to have one program run while another is running
>or being debugged, multiple interpreters (or whatever) would be a
>big win for me...

As mentioned above, will this not come automatically with OS X?  My
understanding is that OS X is likely to become available long before a
major rewrite of MacPerl.

In response to my statement:

>>4) I have not used MacPerl for GUI work.

Larry F. Allen-Tonar asked:

>Would a Perl/Tk port help with GUI work?
>(Although none is available at this time for MacOS.)

Very interesting point!  I am currently working with a group that needs to
build an application that includes both a GUI and access to a central
database.  This application needs to run under Windows, MacOS, and UNIX.
They decided to develop in in Java, and have found it more difficult than
advertised.  I am doing a little side investigation into the feasibility of
using Python as an alternative.  Python/Tk is available for Unix, MacOS,
and Windows.  The advantages of portability is enormous.  The disadvantage
of this approach is that the GUI is not entirely Mac-like and I am under
the impression that flexibility and performance are reduced as well.  Thus,
I am currently working on a Tk(Python) application and a Toolbox(Perl)
application.  I am not yet far enough along to compare these approaches,
but hope that this work will provide me with some insight into the
tradeoffs between Tk and Toolbox.  This, of course, further underscores my
interest in the role of the Toolbox in OS X.

-David-


David Steffen, Ph.D.
President, Biomedical Computing, Inc. <http://www.biomedcomp.com/>
Phone: (713) 610-9770 FAX: (713) 610-9769 E-mail: steffen@biomedcomp.com



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