Re: [Freeciv-Dev] FreeCiv Shareware competitor

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Todd Goodman" <tsg1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> > > What about a Perl or Python interface for writing you own helpers ?
> > 1. Portability.
> > 2. Complexity.
> > 3. Size.
> > 4. Speed.
> 
> Can you be more specific about 2-4?
> If I get you correctly you're arguing against a Perl interface.

Or Python, but I have far more expertise with Perl.

The trick is in combining interpreted Perl code with compiled C code.
In general, you must link a Perl interpreter into the program (the
easy part).  The hard part is correctly getting the code to work
nicely.  This is not at all a simple task in most cases.

This takes care of #2.  #3 is obvious -- linking in a Perl
interpreter, plus the code necessary to deal with it, increases size
tremendously.  It also requires a full Perl installation on systems
that do not already have one, which can use many megabytes of space.

#4 is also a concern; Perl and Python are interpreted, and while
pretty speedy, are still slower than C.

John

-- 
John Goerzen   Linux, Unix consulting & programming   jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx |
Developer, Debian GNU/Linux (Free powerful OS upgrade)       www.debian.org |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Visit the Air Capital Linux Users Group on the web at http://www.aclug.org