Inline Grant Weekly Report #2

This week was a little bit slower but we made progress. We released new versions of Acme::Math::XS and created/released Acme::Math::XS::XS. The two modules are the same except the former uses Inline::Module and the latter uses plain old XS. The idea is to get them both working identically so that there is something concrete to compare.

We did a bit of yak shaving early in the week. We wrote our own blog site software that we are growing up organically. We also patched and released Swim.pm, the markup formatter that all our writings are written in. We are trying to balance staying focused on finishing the grant on time, and also spawning as much cool stuff as we can along the way.

Speaking of cool, we do all our work in a shared dev environment called PairUp™. It works wonderfully, but we wanted others to be able to watch along too (televised pair programming). The way to do this is with termcasting which shows the tmux session in a webpage, so anyone can watch along. Combine this with IRC, and it gets awesome. Unfortunately our termcasting setup was failing us. Fortunately we found doy++ on IRC, brought him into our pairup, had him fix things (he's the master of termcasting) and then we got it working. Come by #inline sometime and watch for yourself.

We further honed the Inline::Module dance. I'll try to explain it. When you create a module like Foo::XS, the lib/Foo/XS.pm module has a line like this:

use Foo::XS::Inline C => "…";

That means you need a lib/Foo/XS/Inline.pm, and you get that with:

> perl-inline-module create Foo::XS::Inline

The new, generated module looks (more or less) like this:

package Foo::XS::Inline;
use base 'Inline';
use Inline::Module 'v1' => '0.02';

When you run tests, this module uses Inline::C to build the C under blib/ like normal XS.

Now, here's the trick (and we haven't actually gotten it working yet)… when it's time build the dist we rearrange things:

1. The version of ::Inline above goes into the inc/ directory
2. The ::Inline under lib becomes a small Dynaloader invoking module
   • This is what gets installed user side
3. The Makefile system is tweaked to build the Inline code at make time

We should get this working in the next couple days. Note that the whole point here is to make something that:

• Works as good or better than hand-XS
• Is easy to distribute using any popular setup
• Installs stuff identically to XS
• Has no user dependencies (including no dep on anything Inline)

In other news, David released Inline::CPP five times and got his cpantester's PASS rate up to an all-time high of 99.4%.