On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 05:58:23PM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote: > At 9:50 PM +0100 6/23/02, Tim Bunce wrote: > >On Mon, Jun 17, 2002 at 07:59:33PM -0400, David J. Goehrig wrote: > >> > >> qw/ who is praying for parrot to support XS code, > >> cause he doesn't want to rewrite > >> SDL_perl's 11,000 lines /; > > > >I'm sure that's not going to happen. > > > >Much more likely is some kind of wrapper that manages a simple > >perl5-like run-time environment (stacks, marks, gimme, symboltable > >etc) plus source-code compatibility support (macros, functions etc) > >that's just sufficient to keep old XS code happy. > > Right. Parrot's not going to have XS as an interface--that'd be insane. > > I'd like to have at least a partially compatible interface that can > be used to help the transition. Plain SV type things (getting/setting > values), and some of the AV/HV things should be doable as well. > > Simple sub calling and suchlike things ought to also be doable with a > thunking layer of some sort. I don't expect most of the stuff in > perlguts, most of which is nasty to deal with, to be provided, though. > > If someone wants to start a list of *sensible* entries in perl 5's > API that should be provided, we can work from there.
Perhaps start with a perl script that reads extension source code (xs|c|h) and spits out details of what perlapi/guts have been used. Feed it N popular extensions, sort the results by frequency and we'd get a (self maintaining) list of what we'd need to support. Tim.
