I have a quick sanity check I'd like to throw out there.

I've been working all week on Alien::TinyCC, and I made some great progress. My initial distribution wasn't properly checking that the build steps completed successfully, so I wasn't getting any useful information back from the smoke testers. Once I fixed that, I started to get some useful feedback. Mostly.

Without knowing it, both Steffen Mueller and I released modules this morning related to using the Tiny C Compiler for compiling C code at runtime! I have tried to make a fuss about mine (as evidenced by my blog entry this morning), but neither of us were aware of the other. Hopefully we can combine forces. Steffen, of course, knows an aweful lot more about typemaps and the available typemaps module ecosystem than do I. I plan to contribute the energy and enthusiasm! :-)

There are many things you might do to speed up your Perl code. After profiling and benchmarking, you revise the slow spots, or maybe try a different algorithm. If you still need more speed, you may use Inline::C, or use PDL if you are doing numerics, or even write your own XS code. Reini Urban has even tried to create a Perl Backend that rewrites your Perl code as C code, and has even worked on a port of Perl5 to Potion.

But let's face it. Sometimes it would just be easier if you could write your code in C, and interpolate a string into it. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a C equivalent of Perl's string eval?

Well, in Perl, now there is.