Perl Seminar NY's seventh season begins this coming Tuesday. We meet on the third Tuesday of each month from October to May.

Date & Time:
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
6:15-8:15 pm

Location:
NYPC Users Group
481 8 Ave
(Ramada New Yorker Hotel building), btw West 34 & 35 Sts, Manhattan
Room 550-51

Main presentation:

David Golden
The Vanilla Perl Project

The Vanilla Perl Project is a community-based effort to provide binary Perl distributions for the Microsoft Windows operating system that include a bundled compiler. Bundling a compiler provides the ability to install XS CPAN modules directly from CPAN.

While releases are still only officially at the alpha stage, Vanilla Perl and its sibling, Strawberry Perl, are the closest thing to Perl on Unix, and are being used on a daily basis by a number of major CPAN authors and Perl personalities when they need to work with Perl on Windows. Among its notable achievements, it is the only Windows-based Perl known to support v6.pm -- the experimental Perl 6 on Perl 5 bootstrap compiler.

David Golden, core developer and release manager, will give an overview of the project's history, status and roadmap as well as a quick guide to getting started, with hints and tips for things that work and things that are still under development.

Jim Keenan
  • Comment on xdg at Perl Seminar NY Tuesday October 17

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Re: xdg at Perl Seminar NY Tuesday October 17
by syphilis (Archbishop) on Oct 15, 2006 at 10:00 UTC
    Hi Jim,
    Could you (or even someone else) impress upon David the following points:

    1)The version of MinGW that ships with Strawberry Perl really should include the fortran compiler (g77.exe) - so that the PGPLOT and PDL (and perhaps other) modules can be built;
    2)Strawberry Perl ought also include the MSYS shell as part of the download - so that C libraries like gmp, gsl, expat, mpfr, netcdf, fftw and others can be built on Win32 (trivially), thus enabling the use of modules that rely on those C libraries;

    (Sorry - I haven't provided links to those C libraries ... Google should find them readily enough.)

    I'm fairly firmly committed to both points ... more so to the former.

    I was going to make both points in person, but I find that my passport has expired ;-)

    Cheers,
    Rob
[reply]

      I think we've had this discussion before, though I can't remember the venue and I support the first point and am open to the second.

      In some of the early Vanilla design discussions, there was concern about not trying to build GNU/Perl if we can avoid it. Including MSYS so that end users can compile libraries pre-supposes that the solution to the external library problem is having each user compile their own.

      In any case, I've added both points to the Vanilla Perl Roadmap, g77 for Build 8 and the other to the "additional toolchain" entry of the backlog. Both would be released and tested in Vanilla before being added to Strawberry. So they're under "official" consideration, to the extent that anything about Vanilla Perl could be considered that.

      -xdg

      Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.

[reply]
        Including MSYS so that end users can compile libraries pre-supposes that the solution to the external library problem is having each user compile their own

        I see the inclusion of MSYS merely as providing another option. You can't always find a library that suits your requirements - eg it wasn't built with the configuration you wanted, or it's a dynamic library whereas you'd prefer a static library so you can distribute binaries of a module without having to include the dll with the package.

        Of course, it's extra bulk to download, and if anyone wants MSYS they can always download it themselves ... hence I refrain from pushing too hard its inclusion.

        Good to hear that g77 is planned for inclusion (subject to testing). I definitely think that's as it should be.

        Cheers,
        Rob
[reply]

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