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

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 10.16 -0500 1999.01.22, David Steffen wrote:
>Is OS 8.X likely to be a supported, active, developing environment once OS
>X is released?

According to Apple, absolutely.  Most Macs out there cannot even run Mac OS X.


>>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?

Carbon is a major subset of the existing Toolbox APIs, and most current
apps will call those APIs, instead of being ported to the NeXT APIs.


>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.

Yes.  Well, that could be the case under MacPerl this year, too.  I
envision not using MacPerl as much in Mac OS X, but possibly (hopefully)
using the Toolbox modules as much or more.


>>>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.)

Well, I think that the fact that a MacPerl standalone app is
source-readable makes it unsuited to shrinkwrapped applications anyway,
since piracy is a no-brainer.  But for the same type of application, sure.
While MacPerl is not ready for writing a BBEdit clone now, it may be in a
few years.  I took "target" not as where MacPerl currently is, but where it
is headed.  And in the future, for writing a full-fledged large
application, I say, "why not?".


>>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.

No major rewrite of MacPerl is necessary for it to run under Mac OS X.  It
will run in the Blue Box today (I think :) and it should run under the
Yellow Box with minor changes.

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

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