in reply to What do you think about ActiveState's Visual Perl .NET??

Well, taken from the ActivePerl site;

Visual Perl is the high-productivity Perl plug-in for Visual Studio .NET. Powerful, Perl-specific features within the familiar Visual Studio environment provide ease of use and accelerated development cycles.

Visual Perl integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio .NET, allowing programmers to fully leverage the features of Microsoft's popular development tool suite.


It really just allows one to use the Visual Studio.net IDE for programming Perl. I used the beta, and thought it was ok, but to be honest my PC is kinda slow (Cyrix 300) and lacking on ram, so I didn't really get to grips with it that much. It offered a lot of functionallity, and is probably nice if you're gonna code Perl along side one of the .Net languages.

It's not really a 'platform' as such, as an editor, like Emacs or VIM. As for your other queries: You can use as many perl modules as you like (although ActivePerl users generally use PPM and not CPAN). And it isn't just for web programming, you can code whatever you like, I don't know what gave you the impression that it was aimed specifically at web development.

So, to some up - it's just an IDE. If you like Visual Studio, and don't mind the price, go for it. If you prefer ViM or Emacs, then don't go for it :). I myself kinda like ViM, but do almost all of my web programming in Editplus, mainly because all the unix desktops are too slow to be usable on this PC.

To be honest, I find the PerlNet component in the Perl Development Kit to be much more interesting. That allows one to use Perl as a .Net language, in much the same way that Jython allows one to write Java bytecode in Jython.
  • Comment on Re: What do you think about ActiveState's Visual Perl .NET??

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Re: Re: What do you think about ActiveState's Visual Perl .NET??
by Anonymous Monk on May 30, 2002 at 22:59 UTC
    Doesn't the PerlNet component just link the native Windows version of Perl with .NET with a bit of glue to allow them to call each other? Perl is not running on the .NET VM, is it?

    If so, then if you use Perl on .NET it won't be portable to other platforms (like Mono, or Parrot's .NET emulation). Ironic, ain't it?

[reply]
      Doesn't the PerlNet component just link the native Windows version of Perl with .NET with a bit of glue to allow them to call each other?

      Yes.

      Perl is not running on the .NET VM, is it?

      No.

      then if you use Perl on .NET it won't be portable to other platforms

      Er, maybe im confused by what you mean by this, but the previous two answers (which you asked rhetorically, so you know this already) clearly indicate that the perl code you write using the .NET IDE, so long as it doesnt utilize other .NET features should be just as (non)portable as the same code written using Emacs, Ultraedit or the commandline. Why should the fact that youve used the activestate IDE change anything?

      Yves / DeMerphq
      ---
      Writing a good benchmark isnt as easy as it might look.

[reply]
        The point was that if you actually use the ability to interoperate between .NET and Perl, then you have used something that is specific to the Microsoft implementation of .NET which is not supported by other versions of the CLR.

        Therefore that is a non-portable thing that is easy to take advantage of. (And is one of Microsoft's platform lock-in tricks even while they make a great song and dance over being platform independent.)

        Now if you use Visual Studio to write Perl and you don't interoperate with .NET in the resulting code, then you have no portability problems. But if you use the PerlNet component, expecting to take advantage of the features that Microsoft lists (including portability), then you have fallen for a bit of a sham.

[reply]
      Well, to be honest, it might, I don't know a massive amount about it. I played with it a bit on my pc, and it worked fine without any noticible deviations from .Net, so I assumed that's how it worked.

      Do you have any urls where I could read up on this?
[reply]

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