Brian Ingerson wrote: > XS is not being killed anytime soon. In fact, Inline will ensure its > existence. Inline depends completely on XS. XS (and friends) are robust > in functionality, but leave so much to be desired in usability. I've > gotten hundreds of testimonials to back that up. Inline started simply > as my attempt to make XS binding more like the other things I did with > Perl. It was almost like I was embarrassed of XS, in my otherwise > excellent new favorite language. > I love the non C ILSMs. Inline::Java rocks! But Inline::C is really > what's helping people who use Perl to make a living. And only C has full > access to Perl's guts. Once I finish up making Inline a top-notch tool > for modules, I'll probably refocus on helping with ILSM projects; like > Guile :) Brian: Several points in defense of your stated goals for Inline: Until Inline made its appearance (due to your foresight and diligence) I could not interest very many people in our organization to wrap the legacy C code that makes up much of our system. Inline's jump forward on the usability curve removed a very large obstacle in our development. Instead of having to rewrite whole subsystems from scratch we can wrap the legacy code and then reimplement the portions that make most sense with Perl. A second benefit of Inline is that wrapping other languages (such as C++ becomes very doable. Last year at the Open Source Conference I asked Chip Salzenberg (Coding to XS) for some examples of wrapping C++ code. The only advice he could offer was to check to see if the Tk code had examples of such code. Along comes Inline::CPP and that impediment was removed! All this to say that Inline opens the doors for many others to begin developing exciting new extensions to broaden the scope and appeal of Perl! Thanks Paul E Wilt Principal Software Engineer ____________________________________________________ XanEdu, Inc. ( a division of Bell+Howell Information&Learning) http://www.XanEdu.com mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 300 North Zeeb Rd Phone: (734) 975-6021 (800) 521-0600 x6021 Ann Arbor, MI 48106 Fax: (734) 973-0737 ____________________________________________________
