Hi all,

Question of interest, just trying to understand why in other languages like Python for example are very different when installing libraries, particularly not going through any test suite and for libraries that have integrated C/C++ code it doesn't have to compile it for your installation when you install.

For example I am using a popular bioinformatics application written in Python (it should have been written in Perl but some bioinformaticians and software developers in the computational biology/bioinformatics/biomedical research community I'm part of decided not to use Perl for some large projects (for reasons that were mostly out of lack of knowledge of what Perl can do) when most every library and app we had before was in Perl and also Java... sorry off topic)

When you first configure the application it automatically fetches library dependencies i.e. Python "eggs" for your version of Python. I see there are multiple libraries that I know have integrated C code and it just fetches them and puts the eggss in the desired folder with no compilation or testing whatsoever. For example, NumPy which has a lot of integrated C code and also pysqlite which has C code it just downloads the egg and I double-checked its not compiling absolutely anything.

You just see this: 

Fetched http://eggs.g2.bx.psu.edu/new/numpy/numpy-1.3.0-py2.6-linux-x8
+6_64-ucs2.egg
Fetched http://eggs.g2.bx.psu.edu/new/pysqlite/pysqlite-2.5.6_3.6.17_s
+tatic-py2.6-linux-x86_64-ucs2.egg

[download]

So, finally the question: why does Perl need to go through all this extra rigmarole of testing and compiling any library C/C++ code?

In reply to Why are other popular languages very different from Perl when installing libraries, e.g. no testing needed and no compilation of C/C++ code done by hermida

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