Friday, May 21, 2010

Sooooo excited

http://blogs.perl.org/users/doubi/2010/05/introduction-and-api-spec.html

I really, really do not enjoy messing around with XS. Being that it is this weird "smerge" of perl and C. I have a few books on the subject, and even after reading them all, and reading examples, and reading tutorials on the web, I still can't seem to ever get it all right. I know that these things come with time, and what XS accomplishes isn't exactly simple stuff, so I should be happy I'm not hand coding it in assembly or whatever.

But ctypes, ::sigh:: those guys in the python world hold that damn library over my head like hammer. Any time I talk about how awesome Perl is, they bring up the drudgery and over-complexity that XS brings to the table when it's time to interface with other languages (while maintaining performance).

I am very thankful for GSoC, and for Ryan Jendoubi and Reini Urban. Good luck gentlemen! If I can help test, or write documentation or something, let me know. (it would probably be best if I stayed out of the code on this one).

1 comment:

  1. If you find yourself doing boring XS code to just wrap OS-level constants or structures, such as would be used by kernel socket options, ioctls, etc... you might also enjoy my ExtUtils::H2PM module, for creating perl wrappers of those without you having to write any C code:

    http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?ExtUtils::H2PM

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