Re: [Freeciv-Dev] FreeCiv Shareware competitor

[Esben Haabendal Soerensen <ehs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 10 Nov 1998, John Goerzen wrote:

> "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.

I don't see why we would need to do it this way.  With a nice UI
layer API all we should do in the case of Perl is to make this
API and its underlying C code available as a native Perl module.
This will should be seperate from the normal GUI client.

> 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.

By making any new UI clients seperate would mean that the size
of the current GUI client will not be affected.

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

Python are also a compiler!  And there are even another compiler
named JPython which among other things can compile Python code
to Java bytecode :-)  Another nice thing with JPython is the ability
to easily mix Python and Java classes both ways :-))

With Perl 5.005 you can also compile Perl.


-- 
/Esben  (bart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx)

: But for some things, Perl just isn't the optimal choice.

(yet)   :-)
             -- Larry Wall in <199702221943.LAA20388@xxxxxxxx>