Hi all, As a few of you may already know, I've been working on a new compilation and linking toolkit, called ExtUtils::Builder. It's intended as a replacement for ExtUtils::CBuilder. ExtUtils::CBuilder has a number of issues that I'm running into: 1) The only thing it does reliably is creating loadable-objects for perl. On some platforms it doesn't do shared libraries or executables, and static libraries aren't in the picture anywhere. It also insists on linking to perl's dependencies on some platforms. This greatly reduces the usefulness of the library. 2) It can't plan ahead, it can only perform the compiling/linking. This is a problem if you for example want to embed it into a Makefile, but also if you want to modify the commands before running. 3) It's very inflexible in its options. It has for example an extra_linker_flags option, but it has a fixed position. Since linker flags tend to be very order dependent, this means it's often the wrong position. Likewise you can't choose it's exportation method, it always does some platform-specific thing (either exporting all or exporting a select set of symbols).
These issues all boil down to «it does exactly what is was designed to do, don't expect anything more». It goes so deep that a redesign from scratch is inevitable to me. I'm dealing with these issues by using a radically different design in EU:B. I'm using builder roles for the compiler and linker that allow you to specify what you'd like them to do. The classes implementing these roles are essentially drivers for various compilers/linkers. These classes build action objects, that can either be executed, or turned into a command to be run (e.g. [qw/cc -o foo.o -c foo.c -Iheaders/]). There's a separate class that inspects perl's configuration uses that to instantiate the known compiler/linker with the right options, but the rest of the framework can be used independently. It's currently in a fairly early state (and rather lacking documentation); it's known to work on Linux, HP-UX and OS X but it is still being ported to other platforms (there is some code for Windows already). I can very much use some platform specialists for help there. Patches and comments are very welcome. The code is at https://github.com/Leont/extutils-builder Leon
