Larry has guaranteed that Perl 6 will be built "out of the same source tree"
as Perl 5. This is a major win for us in two areas. Firstly, we can reuse the
information determined by Perl 5's Configure process to help make Perl 6
portable: for instance, I expect we'll still be using the [UI](8|16|32|V)
typedefs to guarantee integer sizes.
Secondly and more importantly, it guarantees that we've got a copy of Perl on
hand before Perl 6 is built. This allows us to reduce the level of
preprocessor muddling by effectively generating the C source to Perl 6 from
templates and preprocessing. For instance, I expect to see a little macro
language develop for specifying vtable methods, which, when preprocessed,
would also generate the vtables and their corresponding enums. I'd also like
to see Perl choose whether or not a function should invoke the native C
library's implementation or define its own.
What do people think?
--
Gu sa-sur bi nu-ha-za sila-a KU. -- Sumerian saying
