On Tue, Jan 27, 2026 at 03:03:47PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > I'm not very clear on the architecture of the current texi2any in its > various configurations, but I want to point out a significant > advantage of a C-only implementation, as opposed to Perl with C > extensions -- the fact that the former produces binary distributions > that are not bound to a specific version of Perl. If one needs to > install Texinfo on a system other than where it was built, or > distribute precompiled binaries (as, for example, I do on the > ezwinports site), the fact that the extensions need a particular > version of Perl is a huge disadvantage. It means that one either > needs to distribute the whole Perl source tree (to be consistent with > GPL), or one needs to remove the XS extensions from the distro, thus > making texi2any much slower. > > AFAICS, Texinfo 7.2.90 adds quite a few new shared libraries, but they > all depends on the Perl library. > > So if ctexi2any allows, or could allow in some not-too-distant future, > to run the Texinfo converters without any need for Perl, that would be > a significant advantage, even if speed-wise it is not much faster. > > Thus, I think that developing Texinfo in the direction that will allow > eventually to use Perl only for optional extensions is a very good and > worthy goal.
There are still those features that depend on Perl: 1) indices sorting 2) support for the HTML output customization initialization files in Perl 3) some converters, in part (Plaintext and Info) or fully (DocBook, LaTeX and Texinfo XML) 4) (probably easy to replace) reproducible transliteration for tests And for point 2) and maybe 3) it may not be possible to ever remove Perl. -- Pat
