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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."

4 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. More like lack of interest. by Rahga · · Score: 0, Redundant

    "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."

    I was born on a day, but not yesterday. I must admit to not using perl for anything serious in a very long time, but as I recall, many smaller modules in CPAN didn't even work trouble free on an up-to-date linux machine because they were either badly coded or simply didn't run with newer versions of other dependencies. Maybe things have changed, but I doubt access to Windows machines is a real issue for anybody apart from a tiny handful of GNU diehards/blowhards.

  2. Perl::Windows by symbolset · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Pearls::Swine

    --
    Help stamp out iliturcy.
  3. Re:win32 a first-class citizen? by tomhudson · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I know what Win32 is. I also know, having written my own abstraction layer for it, that it's a real POS. Thankfully, I haven't had to use it in over a decade, and have no plans to in the future, just like I don't see myself switching back to Windows either at work or at home.

    KDE 4.1 makes Vista look like an old Buick.

  4. WTF? by actionbastard · · Score: 0, Redundant

    "...lack of access to a Windows environment..."

    Hello? Virtualization?

    --
    Sig this!