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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."

5 of 117 comments (clear)

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

    developed Strawberry Perl to "make Win32 a truly first class citizen of the Perl platform world

    Just one question. Why? Can you even BUY a computer with a 32-bit cpu any more?

    What next - ports for the C64 and Tandy Color Computer?

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

      My point was that Win32 and Windows are not first-class citizens in the computer world. Aside from the desktop, Windows is either late to the party, or trailing badly, or not visible. On the desktop, Windows is also second-class - the Mac has it beat hands down. There's a lot of truth to "Once you go Mac, you never go back" - and part of that is because the Win32 API is a piece of crap, and has been for over a decade. It's been extended since the original add-in that you could download for Win311 to give it 32-bit support, and it shows its' heritage.

      The people who will really get a kick out of a perl Win32 API are the malware writers. I say "Go for it!" The more malware out there, the more likely people are to switch to a real operating system, and not some dog-and-pony-show tarted-up with a ton of lipstick.

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

      Spoken like a true geek: short-sighted, and from the ass.

      Spoken like someone who has drunk so much of the purple kool-ade they can't think of "whatcanpossiblygowrong"? You're the one being short-sighted. Who will be the group that benefits most from a perl Win32 API? Malware authors and their clients. The RBN will be most happy to subscribe to your newsletter.

      Aren't there already enough tools to practice p0wnage on Windows users without adding more?

      Windows is a second-class (or worse) OS. Get used to it, because it's only going to get worse. Or have you forgotten Microsofts' promise that viruses won't run on Windows, so you should switch from DOS. And then the same promise for Windows 95, since it was supposedly a true 32-bit OS?

      Windows can't compete fairly - that was established last century. It's truly second-class.

  2. Good idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Vista is such a memory and CPU hog that you need to "Free Resources (up) for Windows PERL developmeent"

    Start by turning off that aero crap...

  3. At long last by nobodyman · · Score: 0, Troll

    People that hate perl and people that hate windows can *finally* find some common ground!

    Honestly, even a shop teacher can count the number of users that care about this on one hand.