March 2010 Archives

DynaLoader considered harmful

DynaLoader is a portable high-level interface around you OS's dynamic library loading. It's the code that's loading your XS modules. It's actually doing a pretty good job at that. You may wonder then why I consider its use harmful.

If all you want to do is load the XS part of your module, it's the wrong tool for the job. Most of all because it has a truly awful interface. It requires you to inherit your module from it. It's common knowledge that public inheritance from an implementation detail is a really bad idea. It breaks not on…

Threads in Perl, Erlang style

Adam Kennedy's recent post on threads in Padre reminded me to post about an experiment of mine. Last year I learned some Erlang. I really liked their model of multi-threading: many threads that share no data at all and communicate through message queues. A lot of other things where really annoying though, specially their crappy support for strings and lack of libraries in general. I kept thinking I want perl with these threads, so I started implementing it. And thus /users/leon_timmermans/2010/03/index.html

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