[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Plans for 1.12

[Jed Davis <jldavis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

--On Monday, 26 June 2000 11:33 +0200 Artur Biesiadowski <abies@xxxxxxxxx> 
wrote:
> Tobias Bengtsson wrote:
>
> > Why dont we use perl? Perl exists on more platforms than GUILE, more
> > people know how to code it.
<snip>
> 4) Guile is very easily embedded from C application.  I don't know about
> perl, but in most cases I've seen the opposite there - perl calling into
> C code (like the JNI java methods). How easy is to embed perl and calls
> single functions for evaluating things etc ? How well would perl garbage
> collector interacts with C memory management in freeciv ? (I don't know
> answers so maybe it is not a 'against' argument)
Agreed.  I've done some stuff with exporting C/C++ data into Scheme, and 
I've found it fairly simple.  Handling the garbage collection is also very 
simple.  Although I know Perl, I have no experience with its facilities for 
being embedded in existing applications (I don't even know if such a thing 
exists), so I can't comment there.
> 6) As far as platforms are concerned, guile indeed wasn't running on
> non-unix platforms last time I've checked, but there is another scheme
> interpreter called mzscheme, which runs on more platforms. With simple
> wrapper it is possible to choose one of them at compile time without
> changing any code on either scheme or freeciv code.
I'm not sure to what extent another scheme system could be substituted, 
since it's the C interface that's important here, and I'd thought that was 
more or less specific to Guile.  I could be wrong, of course.
In any case, I'm sure it would be possible to make the scripting stuff 
optional; after reading about the problems with libXpm I'm thinking that 
the last thing we need is another library dependency.
--Jed