On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 3:15 PM, Ed . <ej...@hotmail.com> wrote: > I have a "vision" of a Windows-compatible way of abstracting the finding of > non-perl libraries, using Alien::*, probably using Alien::Base. This would > mean there would be an Alien::Glib, etc, which on install would either find > or build and install in perl's site library glib, and at runtime would > dynaload it into perl. > > What are your thoughts?
The first thing that comes to my mind is compilers. On Windows, it's not guaranteed that a compiler is installed; this is why Strawberry bundles a copy of MinGW with it's install, so it can compile Perl modules that have XS extensions. Also, the interaction of software compiled with different C compilers is not guaranteed, i.e. if you compile Perl with one compiler, and then compile XS modules with another, things may not work as you expect. This is true even on Unix systems; it's generally best to use the same compiler for everything that is meant to run together, like Perl and Perl modules that have XS code. In principle, I whole-heartedly support making things easier for end users. I'm not sure right now that Alien would do that, at least on Windows platforms, without more thought towards how to set up and/or guarantee a stable base to install Perl/Perl modules on top of. I'd love to be proved wrong with something that sets your build environment up on Windows (compilers, support binaries), and then does the grunt-work of installing things for you (Glib/Gtk2/Gtk3 and friends). Does this answer your question? Thanks, Brian _______________________________________________ gtk-perl-list mailing list gtk-perl-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-perl-list
