Perl Grant Approved: Improve Perl 5

[Ovid]

For 2006 Q1, only one grant was approved, but it's fantastic. Nicholas Clark is going to spend some time fixing some long-standing issues with Perl 5. Way to go, Nicholas!

Some issues which will be resolved:

• Fix bugs affecting Unicode handling, Class::DBI, Tk and PAR.
• Allow relocatable Perl installations, which permits developers to distribute applications complete with a bundled Perl.
• Support source filters as part of code references in @INC
• Complete lexical pragmas, a milestone on the way to 5.10
• Further memory saving for 5.10 - previous work saved >33% for hashes and arrays
• Merge Larry's p5-p6 work into core, which will allow others to start contributing to it.

See the Perl Foundation blog for more information.

[Aristotle]

• Allow relocatable Perl installations, which permits developers to distribute applications complete with a bundled Perl.

A big round of applause!! Installing modules without root access will finally become trivial. (It’s not hard right now, but it’s a pain to get it going, particularly if you want CPAN.pm to Just Work, and a novice will not easily figure it out.) This should be a huge boon to Perl – huge.

[dsb]

Agreed. There have been a number of occasions where I've said to myself, "If only Perl was installed on all of the companies machines."

[Tanktalus]

For me, it has been a number of occasions where I've said to others, "If only we could easily distribute pre-compiled perl." One less barrier here would dramatically improve the quality of our code: we could convert the rest of our shell code into perl! :-)

[BUU]

Er, perhaps I'm a tad confused, but what exactly is stopping me frmo distributing a compiled perl right now? Activestate seems to manage it..

[chromatic]

I have the impression that AS compiles their Perl with an exceedingly long sets of library paths, then edits the binary after installation to use the actual installation paths on that machine. Clever, but a hack.