Inline Grant Weekly Report #1

We (David and Ingy) had a productive week bootstrapping the Inline-for-XS-Modules project. Our primary optimization flags are:

-Opublic
-Oagile
-Ocreative
-Ofun

Here are some highlights:

• All work being done publicly:
  • David and Ingy code in remote PairUp™ session (tmux)
  • All realtime communication in IRC (irc.perl.org#inline)
  • Tmux to be termcasted soon (live terminal in a browser)
  • If you are interested, come join us!
• Figured out a decent Inline Module API strategy
  • Authors do 3 simple new things to ship Inline code to CPAN
  • No end-user dependency on Inline for these modules
  • End result is essentially same as hand written XS
• Plans to support:
  • 5-6 build systems: ie Dist::Zilla, Module::Build, etc
  • Many Inline languages (other than C/C++ might work)
  • Different extension module use cases: inline/external/libraries
• Created specification document: http://inline.ouistreet.com/node/v3e7.html
• Released two new CPAN modules:
  • Inline::Module (The majority of the grant coding)
  • Acme::Math::XS (first test module using Inline::C)
• Created a new blog site to document the Inline Grant Project
  • http://inline.ouistreet.com/
  • A new site using some of our other loved technologies: Cog, Coffee, make, Swim, Jemplate, gh-pages, BootStrap

It is our hope to finish out most of the work in the next 2 weeks, and then work on bug reports after that. We plan to keep putting out blog posts/reports for at least a couple months after the grant is complete. We believe this work will make Extension Module Authoring a lot more accessible, and we want to keep the energy flowing.

Here's a tiny example of how to make an Inline Extension Module. Take this one-liner:

perl -E 'use Inline C=>"int add(int a, int b){return a+b;}";say add(2,2)'

Turn it into this module:

package Acme::Math::XS;
our $VERSION = '0.0.1';
use Acme::Math::XS::Inline C => "int add(int a, int b) {return a + b;}";

Install Inline::Module:

cpanm Inline::Module

Run this command line:

> perl-inline-module create Acme::Math::XS::Inline

Add this line to your dist.ini:

[InlineModule]

Ship it:

dzil release

One advantage we've seen so far is that simple developer testing, just works:

prove -l t/

There's no need to run make to build the C/C++/XS in blib and then add -b to the prove flags, because this is Inline!