On Wed, Aug 02, 2000 at 11:11:32AM -0400, Andy Dougherty wrote:
> 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.
Good point. I hope someone copied that into an RFC pronto.
Tim.
