[Perl] Making a Perl interface to C code

[Gaal Yahas]

On Sun, Sep 01, 2002 at 12:22:47PM +0300, Shlomo Yona wrote:
> I the sources to some data structure implemented in ANSI-C.
> 
> I would like to make a Perl Module which enables usage of this
> data structure implementation in Perl.
> 
> How do I do this?

Look into the Inline module from CPAN and possibly bundled with new
Perls. It's neat:

> I suppose I'll need to make
> 	1. A Perl module which supplies the Perl interface
> 	2. A Perl module which is the Perl implementation which 
> 		actually talks to the C binaries
> 	3. A Makefile (other technologies?) to build the C binaries
> 	4. A CPAN package (other technologies?) for easily installing
> 		the C sources, building the binaries, installing the 
> 		Perl stuff, and so on...
> 
> I'd be happy to get some "from scratch" help.

With Inline.pm you'll need to do none of these yourself. You just put
the C source inline in your Perl script, and the module takes care of
compilation (and caching the resultant object for the next time),
(run-time) linking, and binding.

There are some issues--there are always some issues--for example in
packaging this for execution where there's no compiler, or doing the
connections if your C source needs preprocessing. But tell me this isn't
a nice start :-)

-- 
Gaal Yahas <gaal at forum2.org>
http://www.forum2.org/gaal/
http://www.livejournal.com/~gaal/