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Free Resources for Windows Perl Development
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."
i hate the break it to you but win32 still dominates the landscape, the cpu being 64bit is irrelevant. sounds like you've been duped by the marketing.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Maybe this link will be a little more useful: http://strawberryperl.com/
The CPAN testers was conceived back in May 1998 by Graham Barr and Chris Nandor as a way to provide multi-platform testing for modules. Today there are 2,653,748 tester reports and more than 400 testers giving valuable feedback for users and authors alike.
CPAN modules are probably better tested cross-platform than libraries for any other language.
That's not netcraft. Its the TIOBE index, which is notorious for being completely inaccurate. Google for "tiobe flawed" and you'll start to see just how worthless it is. That said, perl does have some serious challenges ahead if it wants to stay as popular or gain popularity.
-Lod
it might help to look at the context of the ranking in order to see things in perspective. coming in 8th out of 50 is hardly "dying." and if Perl is dying then Python (7th) isn't far behind, and JavaScript (9th), Ruby (11th), Lisp/Scheme (19th), and Lua (20th) are all definitely dead. not to mention the rest of the ranked languages:
21. ActionScript
22. MATLAB
23. FoxPro/xBase
24. Fortran
25. Ada
26. Transact-SQL
27. Prolog
28. RPG. (OS/400)
29. Erlang
30. NXT-G
31. Awk
32. LabVIEW
33. Haskell
34. ML
35. Objective-C
36. Focus
37. Groovy
38. Smalltalk
39. Euphoria
40. CL. (OS/400)
41. Alice
42. Tcl/Tk
43. Scala
44. Caml
45. Bourne. shell
46. Q
47. Forth
48. Natural
49. APL
50. R
I've used ActiveState's ActivePerl on several windows boxes over the years and have had "trouble-free" experiences with it. Granted, some of the more bleeding-edge modules weren't at the latest revs but the mainstream software I used didn't strictly require those either.
The problem with CPAN Testers is that while it can tell you IF your module is broken, it doesn't give you any way to actually get onto Windows to debug the problem. All you can does is guess the fix and upload a new release, and hope for the best.
CPAN Testers is the canary in the coal mine, which is handy, but doesn't actually help clear out the poison.
Having a lot of testers doesn't seem to actually affect the quality of many of the smaller modules. Many of them have absolutely insane dependency chains, requiring both untested, unreliable modules, often from the same author, and completely deprecated modules for the same component, with massive duplication of modules to do the same small task in slightly different ways.
For the core modules, and those exciting modules likely to be included in the next release, I can see the results of testing work. But many of the smaller ones are one-off debris by sloppy programmers that unfortunately show up in the CPAN search engines. No one seems to test them, and they're apparently not tested again after their original publicaton for compatibility with new perl releases.
If you'd Read My Fucking Article you'd see that the current set is the MINIMUM initial launch set.
The plan once we are running is to start adding more variations as needed. I'd certainly like to have a 2000 instance.
As for the Windows 95 family, as I understand it support was dropped from the current Perl core for anything older than 2000.
If one is forced to use an Alias for online life, might as well make it obvious...
I think someone needs to get their head out of their ass and face reality. Outside the desktop, Windows isn't visible? Really? Windows Mobile is everywhere. So is Windows Embdedded. Windows Server is gaining marketshare.
YOU may consider Windows a second-class citizen, but the market sure doesn't. In an above post, you compared Microsoft to GM, and declared that they were dying. Yeah, sure, they're dying exactly like GM, except for the fact that they're making money hand over fist, have over $70 billion in assets, and haven't required a government bailout.
On top of licensing issues, other accumulated comments included the fact many Unix greybeards have never used Windows before, so the accumulated time to find the right torrent, download it, work out how to install everything etc etc was something they greatly didn't look forward to doing.
It's not that they couldn't, it's just that they are busy people, like everyone else, and the time investment was too big for the relatively small win of closing one or two bugs on Windows.
Shortcutting that process by just letting them log directly into a running instance is considered a significant improvement for that group.
I maintain a few modules on CPAN. Nothing big, I'm the sole author.
In August, I got email from someone complaining that one of these modules doesn't pass its self-tests. After some back and forth, it turns out that it passes on Linux and fails on Windows. They even submitted a patch, but I don't want to integrate it unless I can test it on Windows.
I've got some Windows machines in my house, but I'd have to put together a usable development environment, and it's a hassle, and I've got a day job, and it just hasn't happened in 4 months.
If Alias et. al. can get me access to a Windows environment, this module could get cleaned up a lot sooner.
Perl has been a first class citizen on Win32 starting with the GSAR port back in late 90s, then Perl for Win32 and now ActivePerl.
In fact ActivePerl was more up to date than unix Perl during the late 5.005 and 5.6 because the pumpkin was primarily a Win32 developer.
If you want to find the second class citizens in the Perl world look at OS2, Aix, Hpux, and other strange unixes. I know you want to make Perl better and are working hard on it, but insulting the people who put together the foundation you're now working on is misguided. They did a damn fine job.