MacPerl 5.6.1 has been released. It's the first release of MacPerl in four years, it's built from the 5.6.1 sources, and it's cool. Check out the announcement for more details, and see macperldelta for a summary of the changes (if you ask any questions answered there or in the README, you'll be laughed at and perhaps ignored).
Does OS X not support fork, or is it just MacPerl that doesn't support it (yet)? I would *think* that Darwin would be able to fork.
Re:No fork?
pudge on 2002-03-11T22:34:36
Yeah, Mac OS X can.
MacPerl could, in theory, if we supported the ithread fork method ActivePerl does on Windows. But I don't think it would be worth the effort; anyone who really needs fork would still find it subuseful for all but the most trivial purposes. Then again, porting the test suite would be easier.:-) Re:No fork?
djberg96 on 2002-03-11T22:53:14
But I don't think it would be worth the effort; anyone who really needs fork would still find it subuseful for all but the most trivial purposesThink of all those forking/pre-forking servers out there. I guess the answer is to run a multi-plexed server instead. Since OS X is just a desktop OS at the moment, this probably isn't that big of a deal.
Well, ok then. How about socket programming and IPC? They work ok, right? Oh, and can you build MacPerl with thread support? Your comment leads me to believe the answer is "no", but I thought I'd ask.
Re:No fork?
krellis on 2002-03-12T00:51:36
Well, I'm pretty sure you can build "real" Perl on OS X (I could well be wrong about that...), and thus not have to worry about this whole issue. I always figured MacPerl was still for those in the "dark ages" before OS X, and the lucky ones using OS X can have real Perl. If I'm wrong, I'm sure pudge will smack me around, though:) Re:No fork?
jdavidb on 2002-03-12T01:20:34
You're correct. The real problem is going to be the users on OS X who want the dark age Mac::* modules in "real" Perl.
:) Re:No fork?
jdavidb on 2002-03-12T01:19:00
OS X is not the issue. MacPerl is just for pre-X Macs. You would use real Perl for OS X.
I remember that when Perl was ported to OS X all sorts of scripts broke that did things like $^O =~
/win/. Think "Darwin." :) Re:No fork?
pudge on 2002-03-12T03:36:25
I don't think you understand... Macs (OS 7 through 9) wouldn't be good to handle a forking server. MacPerl has a limited amount of RAM allocated to it. If you go off "forking" threads here and there, you'll run out of memory really quick. The only way around that is to give MacPerl a huge static memory allocation, which is seldom reasonable, or rewrite MacPerl to draw from the system heap, which sounds to me like a lot of work.
Mac OS X can handle this just fine, of course. It is Unix. It has forking and real virtual memory.
Sockets work fine. Traditional Unix IPC doesn't work, since the concept is foreign to Mac OS. However, IAC (Interapplication Communication) works fine, with Apple events. PPC (Program-to-Program Communication) sockets *can* work, but no one ever used them that I know of, and we never got around to adding in support for them in the latest version.
To my knowledge MacPerl has never been built with thread support; it's possible, but I've never tried.
