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Where's the "IronPerl" Project?

Posted by kdawson on from the more-than-one-way dept.

pondlife writes "A friend asked me today about using some Microsoft server components from Perl. Over the years he's built up a large collection of Perl/COM code using Win32::OLE and he had planned on doing the same thing here. The big problem is that as with many current MS APIs, they're available for .NET only because COM is effectively deprecated at this point. I did some Googling, expecting to find quickly the Perl equivalent of IronPython or IronRuby. But to my surprise I found almost nothing. ActiveState has PerlNET, but there's almost no information about it, and the mailing list 'activity' suggests it's dead or dying anyway. So, what are Perl/Windows shops doing now that more and more Microsoft components are .NET? Are people moving to other languages for Windows administration? Are they writing wrappers using COM interop? Or have I completely missed something out there that solves this problem?"

4 of 390 comments (clear)

  1. Don't if this would help but.... by prayag · · Score: 5, Informative

    here goes nothing Programming Perl in Dot Net

  2. Re:What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Microsoft was shipping Perl interpreters for Windows at least as far back as the Windows NT 4 Resource Kits (like 1998?). There is a long history of Perl on Windows.

  3. Re:No one made it cause no one cares by LodCrappo · · Score: 5, Informative

    The figures on this simply don't support that claim. Your anecdotal evidence of two places you worked it meaningless.

    If anything I'd say this is because many people consider Perl's time to have passed and no longer see a reason to use it in any significant project.

    Funny.. I'd like to see the figures behind your claims that "many people consider Perl's time to have passed".

    A quote from CIO.com story entitled "PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl, Python, and Tcl Today: The State of the Scripting Universe" (8/29/08)

    "Of all the scripting languages, Perl offers the biggest installed base of applications, of code, of integrated systems, of skilled programmers. It has the lowest defect rate of any open-source software product. It is ported to essentially every hardware architecture and operating systems, from embedded control systems to mainframes. It is optimized for speed, for memory footprint, for programmer productivity. It has readily-accessible libraries for all types of programming tasks: Web application development, systems and network integration and management, end-user application development, middleware programming, REST and service-oriented architecture programming. Perl is ideal for the organization that takes charge of its own IT future."

    Other interesting stats and info throughout the story..

    full article

    --
    -Lod
  4. Re:No one made it cause no one cares by ggvaidya · · Score: 5, Informative

    To be fair, that quote is by Richard Dice, the president of the Perl Foundation, so he might be a little biased. :-)

    On the other hand, Perl still gets many more job postings on dice.com than any other interpreted language, including PHP: http://www.presicient.com/langjobs.html