Re: Perl 6 and external libraries

[jonadab]

I... know that Perl5 cannot

Actually, Perl5 can, if there is a module for it. Writing such a module requires more than surface-level knowledge and usually involves C (and sometimes also XS), but for well-known libraries there is often one already written and available on the CPAN.

Perl6 (err, Parrot, actually) will hopefully make the writing of such modules rather easier, and allow them to be written once (in any language (that targets Parrot)) and used many times (in every language (same caveat)), but I have not closely tracked the progress on that front.

[chromatic]

Parrot does make bindings to shared libraries that use C calling conventions much easier, and that works fairly well at the moment. I suspect that HLLs will all share the native Parrot bindings, but there will be HLL-ish and HLL-specific wrappers around the low-level bindings for individual languages.