On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Tim Bunce wrote:
> Perl5 XS/GUTS is the way it is largely because it was designed with
> performance in mind. I think Larry did a very good job. My only big
> worry for perl6 is that, without great care, we'll loose that
> performance edge in the name of a 'clean API'.
Another important factor is that at the time XS was created, we really
didn't have a firm idea about exactly what sorts of things people would
need to do. So things were left rather wide open so that an
overly-restrictive conceived-in-advance safe API wouldn't get in the way
of people getting work done. (At least that was my mindset at the time;
I can't speak for others.)
One obvious downside is that it's become very hard to change anything in
the perl core for fear that some XS module somewhere (not even necessarily
on CPAN) will break as a result of the change.
I do hope perl6's internals have far more static/private/whatever
functions & variables and have far fewer visible to the outside world,
if that can be done without impacting performance too much.
--
Andy Dougherty [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dept. of Physics
Lafayette College, Easton PA 18042
