Re: Question regarding internals and embedding APIs

Sorry, this message got eaten as spam, and I've only just found it.

On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 06:51:06PM -0400, Millsa Erlas wrote:
> Will Ponie support the Perl embedding and internals API necessary to 
> allow applications to be able to embed Perl 5/Ponie? This would 
> desirable, since many applications already utilise this to embed Perl, 
> such as Gaim for instance.

I'd not really thought about this. I don't know. It will certainly be
possible to embed ponie by embedding parrot, and running ponie inside that.

My initial thought is that it's not a priority. Perl 5 isn't going away,
so for applications that always used to embed Perl 5, they can keep on
embedding the "classic" Perl 5 in the existing way. Applications that want
to embed Perl 6 would logically need to embed Parrot, which I hope will have
an API similar to the Perl 5 API.

Then again, the current level at which Ponie is changing the specific Perl 5
API calls into wrappers to call into Parrot, maintaining the existing Perl 5
embedding API might fall out with no extra work whatsoever.

It should be possible to wrap parrot up to appear to be perl. There are
enough other tasks between here and there that I can't answer confidently
on what will happen.

Nicholas Clark