Re: The world of pain that is XS compilation.

[ysth]

In getting CBuilder to work in the perl source tree, I had to compare parts of CBuilder with their MM equivalent, and I have to say there were gems that got left behind (or were added after CBuilder was started?). One in particular that I remember was the limited support for cross-compiling that makemaker has.

AIUI, the xsubpp isn't really improved: the code was just moved from a script to a module and the script now uses the module. From my perspective, the really significant impact of this is that xsubpp tests can now be written (but haven't yet been).

[kwilliams]

That's correct, xsubpp wasn't improved at all. I did do some cleanup of code (adding "use strict" to some of it and lexicalizing variables) but that's about it. The main reason I wanted to stick it in a module was so that I could call its code - which after all, just reads in a file and writes another - without calling a subprocess.

I also agree that there are certainly gems (or necessary kludges, in some cases) from MM's C-compilation code that aren't in CBuilder. I'm depending on people submitting bug reports (and patches for platforms I can't test on) so I can fix them.

Since CBuilder and ParseXS went into the core, I've gotten lots of good patches and suggestions, which will make their way into the next version.

 -Ken