Re^2: Perl 6 was released years ago

[hardburn]

in reply to Re: Perl 6 was released years ago
in thread Perl 6 was released years ago

I also forecast that a bunch of people will want to use Perl6 to make binaries for distribution, to hide their source code, and all the pro-con discussion which goes with that.

IIRC, the current plan for the bytecode compiler would include a section that had the orginal source verbatim. So the "hide our crappy code!" people aren't getting a bone thrown to them. Which is fine by me.

[diotalevi]

I would assume the standard answer would then be, remove the verbatim copy and run without it.

[hardburn]

Perhaps. It may well be (and I'm probably ranting about issues I don't know enough about) that the orginal source section is there as intrinsic functionality for running the bytecode. In any case, I don't think the Parrot/Ponie people should go out of their way to appease the "hide our code" group.

[Elian]

We aren't going out of our way -- I don't much care whether you can or can't hide your source. Not my problem. I'd expect that even mildly optimized code will be fairly difficult to turn back to source, and we're certainly going to give the capability to strip out the source metadata from the bytecode (mostly for space reasons, but we can't force all the compilers to emit sane source metadata so we have to be able to run without it) so folks'll be getting at least some 'hidden source' capabilities.

If this offends someone's sensibilities, I fully expect we'll have at least a primitive decompiler relatively quickly. :) And parrot'll ship with a working disassembler if you don't mind assembly. (Whether that helps depends on what we do, if anything, for signed or ECC'd bytecode)