Garrett D'Amore wrote:
1) Perl is a massive beast. The perl5.8.4 delivery in S10 (in
/usr/perl5) is 36 Megabytes. This creates a substantial hurdle for
folks trying to build a minimal/minimized Solaris (think of use in
appliances).
The perl in the miniroot (SUNWperl584core) is much smaller - it excludes
the docs and is a cut-down version. You could use that.
5) perl can fill/compete with some of the same niches where Java plays.
While we may have things we like/dislike about Java, I think having
"split focus" on core platform technology hurts the platform. But at
least Java comes with a stock GUI, and can support a secured sandbox.
They are intended for completely different audiences. Perl is more for
sysadmin types, Java is for developer types. There's no inherent conflict.
I have nothing against us providing perl, or even APIs for system
management in perl, provided that we also provide C language bindings
for those APIs, and that we (Solaris) avoid use of the perl APIs in
tools that could reasonably be considered to be "core technology".
(kstat and the proc tools are good examples!)
Actually, /bin/kstat is just about the worst example you could have
chosen to illustrate your point. /bin/kstat is a *very* thin perl
wrapper around the Sun::Solaris::Kstat module, which in turn is almost
entirely written in C, which is in turn just a wrapper around the
libkstat(3LIB) C library.
--
Alan Burlison
--
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