Where's the "IronPerl" Project? 390
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?"
Don't if this would help but.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What? (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.
Perl6 (Score:4, Informative)
A main reason is that Perl 6, which has been in development for nearly as long as .NET, was supposed to be a VM itself. In effect, it was a competitor to .NET.
Way back when IronPython and IronRuby were starting, Perl 6 looked like it was Nearly Here, so no one thought porting Perl 5 to run on .NET was worth it. Since Perl 6 still hasn't materialized, guess it was a bad choice...
Search harder (Score:5, Informative)
Perl is an antique language. You should look at a modern scripting language. Powershell is much more powerful as it pipes .net objects instead of text.
Try asking "PerlMonks" (Score:5, Informative)
PerlMonks [perlmonks.org] is the right place to ask this question, IMO. You'll be posing the question to a lot of very experienced Perl users who might have similar experiences to yours, or good advice on what to do next. The PM community is friendly and very helpful as well.
Re:Perl in decline, at least here (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah Python developers tend to like Boo, which is very Python-inspired.
The CIL part of the CLI is stack-based, and is more of a "theoretically generic" intermediary language, and works for almost any purpose.
The CTS (Common Type System) does have some limits (no multiple inheritance except multiple interface inheritance). Your language implementation only has to play nice with the CTS if you want it to interoperate with other languages on the CLI. (Normally you can write an app in a whole bunch of languages and the metadata is exposed to the others - so you might choose to use C# for your core services, C++/CLI for interop work, and something like Python/Boo for your business layer).
I think the Eiffel implementation ditches the CTS, or extends it. That has its ups and downsides (mainly down imo).
Re:Perl in decline, at least here (Score:1, Informative)
You seem to be the only other person to notice my first thought - does it really matter if the language is interpreted anyway and has a version for your platform?
I like Perl, I started using it last year and have been using it to write web apps, but when it comes to writing Windows applications I wouldn't start out using Perl. I haven't even looked much into .NET either. I've just been writing any Windows applications in Delphi - which possibly ends up compiling its code in such a way to use .NET APIs where possible, but again I haven't really looked into it :) The apps I've written with Delphi 2007 seem to work fine in Vista anyway (our MD bought a Vista machine just for the "ooh, shiny!" factor :/ ).
Re:No one made it cause no one cares (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 [cio.com]
Re:Been in similar shoes (Score:5, Informative)
You probably should have had a look at Strawberry Perl [strawberryperl.com].
Most of the Perl technocrati abandoned ActivePerl for it over the last year, because all the CPAN modules Just Work.
(Full Disclosure: I made Strawberry) :)
Re:No one made it cause no one cares (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 [presicient.com]
Re:Perl in decline, at least here (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, and I forgot:
I think it's more that IronPython is basically a vanity/research project, akin to JPython/Jython a few years ago
Jython has had a resurgence last year. Sun even hired Ted Leung towork on it full time.
http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/03/03/the-sun-is-going-to-shine-on-python/ [sauria.com]
Re:Don't fight it - Perl is here to stay! (Score:3, Informative)
So what you do is write yourself a Makefile.PL that lists all the dependencies, just like those fancy CPAN modules.
Then you run this...
> cpan .
And the CPAN client will just treat your applications dependencies like a CPAN distribution and run off and install all the dependencies for it in one go.
Windows powershell is the answer (Score:1, Informative)
Windows recently created a tool called PowerShell which is a rather fully-featured language which gives you basically full access to win32 and .Net APIs from a script. So while perl / python / ruby may be a more comfortable choice for many people, the use of those languages on Windows platforms is likely to always be less fully featured than the MS solution.
See http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/default.mspx for more info.
Re:Perl in decline, at least here (Score:4, Informative)
*sigh*, Python is a lot of things, but it is NOT well defined. Maybe Python is OK compared to the other open source source scripting languages like Perl and Ruby. C is a well defined language (except for the bits that are explicitly left undefined), Pascal is really well defined, and Lua is pretty damn good.
I expect that Perl is left out because a lot of its strengths are in Unix scripting, database libraries, bioinformatics applications and other goodies, which rely on C code and a Unix platform. Ruby Gems and *cough* easy_install just aren't the treasure troves of CPAN, and CPAN can't be easily ported to .net.
Re:Python is available (Score:4, Informative)
No, a Perl lover will jump in and say Perl is FAST to write. Its so easy to do so many things. I'm not talking large systems here, I'm talking things you need to do day to day.
I've yet to find another language where I can process a text file 100 different ways with just a few lines. I really don't give a damn if anyone else can read or maintain my short scripts. There for me.
Re:Perl in decline, at least here (Score:2, Informative)
You're right, there's no formal Python specification. However, CPython is for all practical purposes the spec, with a separate stable and successful implementation (Jython).
Perl on the other hand, has no spec other than Perl5, and no separate independent implementation.
And quite frankly, saying that Perl5 is the spec is a little bit like saying that the blueprints for that building over there are available only as crayon scribblings scattered in random walls of odd-numbered floors.
On the other hand, and I say this as a Python proponent, nothing comes close to CPAN. And let's not forget that Perl5 (on *nix at least) is about as stable and proven as you can get with software nowadays.
Re:perl missed several boats, sadly (Score:3, Informative)
There have always been some things that you needed to do on the server side (e.g., validate the user's password), and some that were better done on the client side (e.g., warn the user *before* he hits the submit button that his social security number only has 8 digits). That hasn't changed. The only thing that's changed is that more people are doing ajax. An ajax app still needs to have some things happen on the server side, and perl is still a perfectly reasonable language for that.
It doesn't need to be crappy. JavaScript is a very nice programming language, with good support for functional programming, and a lean, simple way of supporting OOP. You also don't need to embed your javascript directly in the HTML. I don't have any experience with php, but anyway I don't see what any of this has to do with perl, which is the language you'd be using on the server, not the client.
Mod_perl is totally irrelevant here; either use it (if you need the performance boost) or don't (if you don't). As far as templating kits, if you don't like that kind of thing, don't use it. Generating HTML with perl code isn't exactly rocket science. The horrible mess with frameworks is more of an issue with ajax, which is rocket science to get working well, across browsers.
So what? Why should it bother me as a perl coder if perl 6 is a long time coming? Perl 5 is a great language.
Here you're just misinformed. Perl 6 has always been planned to be 100% backward-compatible with perl 5. I don't know if the current non-release implementations have perl 5 compatibility yet, but they will by the time they're ready for release.
If perl is losing any mindshare (and is it? -- I haven't seen any data to demonstrate that), I don't think any of your reasons hold water. What might be more of an issue is that we've been going through a fad for OOP, but Perl 5's support for OOP is ugly.
Re:perl missed several boats, sadly (Score:3, Informative)
yep, you have several good points there.
maybe I wasn't sufficiently clear, but what I meant by "embedding the code in the html" was not a reference to Javascript, but to PHP and ASP type of programming.
my point is that PHP could only have happened through a major blunder of the perl community, since it is basically a bland clone of perl. I don't see the languages themselves being different enough to make a difference, so I tend to think that the main reason why PHP took off is that it has a dead easy programming model ("change your files extension to .php and embed your <?php php code ?> in there"), and is friendly towards shared hosts, by basically resetting the interpreter between requests and having "safe_mode". The point is that all these things are possible to do with perl, but no-one at the time bothered to produce a package that did them and was simple to install, or if anyone did, they didn't make enough noise. So php came and filled the gap for the wider world, while the perl people smugly replied "we can do that too, and about 10,000 other things".
so yep, I know you can use mod_perl for the performance, and templating kits if you like them, and that CGI is still available. I regularly use all of these :)
besides, as a perl programmer, it bothers me if the perl community shoots itself in the foot, because I enjoy perl programming for the web, and that market looks to me like it's dwindling.