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Free Resources for Windows Perl Development

Posted by kdawson on from the christmas-present dept.

jamie pointed out an important announcement in the Perl community. Adam Kennedy, known as Alias, developed Strawberry Perl to "make Win32 a truly first class citizen of the Perl platform world." Over the last year, major CPAN modules have used Strawberry Perl to get to releases that work trouble-free on Windows. But the tens of thousands of smaller modules on CPAN are lagging, in many cases because of lack of access to a Windows environment for development and testing. Now Alias has worked with Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab to provide for every CPAN author free access to a centrally-hosted virtual machine environment containing every major version of Windows. "More information (and press releases) will follow, the entire program under which this partnership will be run is so new it's only just been given a name, so some of the organisational details will ironed out as we go. But for now, to all the CPAN authors, all I have to add is... Merry Christmas. P.S. Or your appropriate equivalent religious or non-religious event, if any, occurring during the month of December, etc., etc."

2 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Re:win32 a first-class citizen? by tomhudson · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    A decade ago, GM was also making money had over fist. GM is celebrating its' 100 year anniversary facing bankruptcy in weeks. Microsoft will probably end up being bought by Apple for chump change long before it hits its' 100 years.

    Also, the government (and most governments world-wide) having adopted the Word .doc format as a "standard" for so long is a HUGE government subsidy, and one that won't lst much longer. Your tax dollars can be better leveraged by using software that doesn't tie your government to one vendor. Single-sourcing is inherently uncompetitive, and risky.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone Both Symbian (46%), Apple (17.3%) RIM (15.2%) beat out Microsoft (13.6%) in the smartphone OS market. Not exactly high-profile, and with Android coming out, linux looks to be the major threat http://code.google.com/android/what-is-android.html

    Android relies on Linux version 2.6 for core system services such as security, memory management, process management, network stack, and driver model. The kernel also acts as an abstraction layer between the hardware and the rest of the software stack.

    Supercomputing? Windows has 5 entries in the top 500, linux and various linux distros have 452. In terms of actual computing power, it's even more lopsided.

    In terms of gaming consoles, the Wii and the DS blow both the xbox and the ps3 out of the water.

    Next you'll be claiming the Zune is a threat to the iPod. Microsoft produces second-rate products. The Win32 API is ancient, cruft-laden, and also second-rate.

  2. Re:Every major version of Windows? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Well good day to you too....