Perlbox: A Unix Desktop Written in Perl

cascadefx writes "It appears that this programmer has created an Open Sourced Unix Desktop, PerlBox, written in Perl and Tk. I found this posted in response to an article on Perl Monks asking if Perl was obsessed with CGI?. Apparently not. Check it out, it looks pretty interesting." I wonder how fast it runs?

Comments

Re:I wish...

[Shiny Metal S.]

I wish that PERL had a GUI abstraction layer, similar to DBI for databases.

See Gtk, Gnome, Tk, Qt and Wx CPAN distros.

Re:I wish...

[Shiny Metal S.]

Now, if someone wanted to write a real abstraction layer, maybe one that would let you use either Perl/Tk, Perl/GTK+, or something else... that coule be interesting :-)

See Wx.

Re:Speed

[Fweeky]

> Don't Perl scripts get compiled every time they are run?

Yes, but it's compiled into an internal bytecode format, not an executable binary.

In this sense it's more like Java -> Bytecode -> JVM (hence Perl -> Bytecode -> PVM) than, say, C -> Object code -> Native Binary. Not quite, but near enough.

Python has the same property, as do many otherwise interpreted languages. Parrot (the engine Perl 6 will use) is also bytecode based, and probably has more in common with a Java VM, in that it impliments a sort of dynamic-language CPU with registers and instructions, rather than just a tree of tokens the interpreter can easily walk along.

Re:B - The Perl Compiler

[Shiny Metal S.]

Damn it, I @#%!$& up the links! Of course it's Overrated since it's broken. Here:

• B The Perl Compiler
• B::Asmdata Autogenerated data about Perl ops, used to generate bytecode
• B::Assembler Assemble Perl bytecode
• B::Bblock Walk basic blocks
• B::Bytecode Perl compiler's bytecode backend
• B::C Perl compiler's C backend
• B::CC Perl compiler's optimized C translation backend
• B::Concise Walk Perl syntax tree, printing concise info about ops
• B::Debug Walk Perl syntax tree, printing debug info about ops
• B::Deparse Perl compiler backend to produce perl code
• B::Disassembler Disassemble Perl bytecode
• B::Lint Perl lint
• B::Showlex Show lexical variables used in functions or files
• B::Stackobj Helper module for CC backend
• B::Terse Walk Perl syntax tree, printing terse info about ops
• B::Xref Generates cross reference reports for Perl programs

See also perlcompile, perlhack, perlguts, perlxstut, perlxs, perldebtut, perldebug and perldebguts manpages.

(Note to self: Check those URLs!)