On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Robin Berjon wrote:
> I know what you mean but this is MicroPerl, not Perl. I don't know how much
> difference it makes, but it's certainly smaller. I'm afraid I can't help
> with embedding it though. I like the idea, not just for rewrites (I'm quite
> happy with mod_rewrite most of the time) but for all the conf stuff. It
> doesn't have dynaloader, but you could still do things like read conf from
> a flat file db or that sort of thing.
Hacking down the size of the code is good, but now when it comes down to
hacking down features, and features must go if you are to shrink perl. Ok
so the fullsize language is a ~350 K addon to apache, for that we get all
the good stuff like superoptimising compiler, that is very smart about
figuring out 'smart' code. If you really want to go that way, PHP4
probably one of the better shots you have. Besides PHP was vowed to be
an improved language over the perl for the web development, and to degree
it is if you just want to hack together a small database enabled comments
book. However me knowing perl is advantage over PHP, because horsepower is
cheap, disk troughput will always faster than that of a network speed,
modularity and superflexibility of the perl will always will be
irreplacable.
MicroPerl is akin to what PHP zealots used to tout PHP as, and yes perl
can be awkward to read at times, but thats why it is good, there is
breathing space wasted to let coder's brain sort of relax, like long
function calls for invoking Regular Expressions on the string vs =~. PHP
in some ways is faster than perl, but hey, I do not compare Saleen Mustang
to a Lamborgini Diablo.
Hope you will make the right choice for yourself, not us ;-)
Pavel
