Mac Forum / Programming / Perl / December 2007

Oddly, there's not a whole lot of actual Perl code in it, although what's
there is kind of obscure. Autoload is used to catch method calls that aren't
implemented in Perl, and send them across the bridge, tied arrays and hashes
to implement the Perl side of "toll free" bridging, and attributes are used
to declare method signatures.

Of course, there's a good amount of XS programming involved. You'd need to
know your way around the perlembed, perlguts, and perlapi docs.

And you'd definitely need to know your way around Cocoa, and the Objective-C
runtime functions. Perl classes are registered with the ObjC runtime, and
participate directly in the inheritance hierarchy; the key difference with
such classes is that their selectors all share the same IMP (aka
implementation function), which uses Perl's internal API (i.e. perldoc
perlapi) to reflect the call to Perl. The ObjC runtime is also used to get a
list of registered classes at startup, after which libperl functions are
used to create all the packages and @ISA arrays that are needed for the
autoloading to work when Cocoa methods are called from Perl.

On the Cocoa side, there are NSArray and NSDictionary subclasses whose
primitive functions use libperl functions to access Perl's arrays and
hashes, respectively. To deal with that, you'd need to understand how
Cocoa's class clusters work, and how to add a new concrete subclass to them.

sherm--

You're going to want to know a lot about how write applications for OS
X. At the very least you will want to have some passing familiarity with
Objective-C, XCode, and other Apple tools, like interface builder.

CamelBones is designed to make the underlying Objective-C API accessible
to perl. Obviously the more you know about the Objective-C API the
easier it is, at least that is what I would imagine.

    Jeremiah

Thanks for the support. I honestly don't know if how I'm feeling qualifies
as clinical depression, or just plain old blues. One reason I brought it up
in public is that it's been kind of feeding on itself. There's a bit of a
stigma attached to emotional issues, so I've been reluctant to say anything.
But keeping quiet meant keeping CB users in the dark about my reasons for
the lack of progress. Guilt about keeping y'all in the dark made me feel
worse... and so on. Breaking that cycle and being open about what's going on
has helped a little.

Not to boast about it, but... I am proud of it! :-) It's my best technical
achievement to date. In terms of social importance and effect on people's
lives though, it still takes a back seat to my work on children's web sites
at WGBH. That was dead-simple CGI work, but how could I not feel good about
helping kids learn to read?

Fish in a barrel. :-)

There was actually a Debian package for 0.3. But, the GNUStep makefile has
fallen way out of date, and I'm not sure that the whole "support bundle"
scheme is really relevant there anyway. Given the system-wide package and
dependency management on Debian (and other Linux distros), there isn't the
need to have a single .app bundle that's binary-compatible with a variety of
libperl versions, like there is for a Mac OS X CamelBones.

3. I think some kind of team maintainership is good. If Tom wants to

Even being able to share the job would be a load off my mind. One source of
anxiety is just that there's no one else - if I have a breakdown, or get hit
by a bus, or whatever, it'd be pretty darned hard for someone else to pick
up the pieces. There are a lot of smart people here, and I'm sure the
project would go on eventually, but it would be a lot harder than it really
should be.

One way that people could help out would be documentation. I've been using
Drupal (yeah, I know, PHP, boo hiss...) on a community-oriented portal site
I built for a friend. Its "book" module actually looks pretty nice for
managing community-written docs.

There could be more example apps too - the current selection is pretty thin.
And, there could be more full-scale apps. A Perl-based office suite would be
interesting, and far too big a task for one person. I've always wondered why
there are no Perl-based word processors or text editors. Given Perl's
facility with text, it seems like it would be a pretty obvious idea.

4. It is really important, I feel, that this project lives on.

That's important to me also, which is why I'd rather step down than see it
derailed by my current situation and mental state.

sherm--