GSoC 2015

[srlakhe]

Hi guys,

I am interested in contributing to Native Client for GSoC 2015. I am interested in the Support Perl Project and want to get started on it.

Kindly communicate,

Regards,

shreyas

[Bradley Nelson]

Hi Shreyas,

Excited to hear about your interest.

Let me tell you a little more about what's likely involved in the Perl port.

The main Perl codebase is obviously the ideal one to focus on, but it has a special challenge.

The last time I investigated and attempted a port, it's cross-compile support was very limited.

It essentially consisted of "give me the hostname of a machine to ssh to that can run binaries of the target architecture".

That said, apparently there have existed at various times re-expressions of the build that do support a proper cross-compile. These, unfortunately, appeared to be one-offs that were never upstreamed, and have bit-rotted.

A fallback possibility is microperl, which is apparently a reimplementation of Perl that's reasonably complete, but done in a more modern style. Core perl would obviously be preferreable, but porting microperl would definitely be a good starting point / warm-up. I have reason to suspect it would be a fairly trivial port.

For both microperl and Perl, an additional challenge is adding process creation support. We have a library (nacl-spawn) which supports a limited form of process creation, but it frequently requires programs that use it to be modified. As process creation is a huge part of what makes Perl useful, getting it to work is likely to be an area worth putting a good amount of effort into. Improving nacl-spawn's generality might play a part in this.

Many different things use Perl, but one interesting one is git. A few of the git tools are written in Perl, and so unavailable in our current port. Sorting this out might be another easy follow on.

Please feel free to contact me off list if I haven't scared you away yet :-)

-BradN

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