Perl in small devices
I’ve participated in some discussions about running perl on small devices during the Perl Reunification Summit and YAPC::Europe.
The targets would be java/dalvik, objective-c/ios, and arduino. There is some work going on by Martin Berends (mberends++) on arduino, and Claes Jakobsson (claes++) on the jvm. Claes is working on reading and writing .class files.
We’ve discussed how they could use one of the Perlito parsers to implement a prototype, using either the ast-perl5 or ast-perl6 output:
$ node perlito5.js -Cast-perl5 -e ' print "hello, World!\n" ' > hello.ast5
Reini Urban (rurban++) showed me how to add type information to perl5 code:
$ perl -e '$int::; my int $x'
Type information would help the generated code to perform better and use less memory.
I blog about Perl.
To target jvm/dalvik, i.e. translating perl5 opcodes to .class files, the easiest would be perlito or fork from B::C.
To target the iphone, I guess traditional cross-compilation would work best.
Interestingly now also for android.
PerlDroid seems to work now fine cross-compiled.
See e.g. http://code.google.com/p/perldroid/wiki/HowDoImportAClassInPerl
Larry also has a working Java interaction, but since perl had not enought type information, he calls perl from java.