build system improvements, p2 plans (perl backends)

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rurban

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Jan 16, 2013, 12:28:13 PM1/16/13

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I plan to use potion, the VM and compiler for a perl fork, codename p2.
perl5 and perl6, in spirit of parrot, just 40x faster, and better than the ongoing perl on JVM plans.
See https://github.com/perl11/potion/blob/p2/README.p2

So naturally I'm going to enhance potion also.
New are libpotion.so, improved make times, seperated config and
dist/install targets via config.inc, dist.mak.
I didn't like that every make probed and shelled too much. Now it only does when needed.

I fixed load readline (the wrong path),
and changed the LOADER_PATH to (lib, PREFIX/lib/potion, .)
. at first is a security risc.
added support native extensions: darwin .dylib vs .bundle.
With load .pnb is favored over .pn.
I also added libdisasm support for nicer jit debugging, and improved the parser interface for multiple language support.

I'll add in the next months dlcall (FFI), exception handling, arbitrary precision math and a lot of libraries to support perl5 and nqp, the perl6 bootstrapper.

I'll probably come up with a fast intermediate language to write those libraries, and I'm not sure if it will be potion (the language) or a small fast subset of perl.