Perl in OS X

[darraghsmyth]

Hi,

I'm looking in to buying a 12" Powerbook. Coming from a linux and windows background, I'm increasingly tempted with the all-in-one offering from OS X on Apple.

I wrote a lot of perl scripts in linux and I was wondering if anyone here had much experience with running Perl on the Apples? Is it a similar/same flavour as those on other unix platforms? In particular, is there any functionality that does *not* work or requires completely modules?

Thanks in advance for all your help and advice.

darragh

 

[crenz]

Darragh,

I'm currently writing my diploma thesis using Perl v5.8.1-RC3 built for darwin-thread-multi-2level (comes with Panther) on a PowerBook. Generally, it works as good as on any other Unix -- ie., the usual networking, CLI, Web etc. stuff work as usual. XS modules compile just fine if they're well-written, as Mac OS X comes with GCC.

It's a bit more tricky to do GUI stuff. You can either use CamelBones to create an OS-X only GUI, using Xcode, or you can use wxPerl (bit of a challenge to compile) to create a GUI using wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows) that will run on Windows and other Unixes also. Tk should also work on OS X, but I never tried that.

There's quite a number of modules for Mac OS X-specific stuff (e.g. to execute AppleScript scripts or set file attributes), look for Mac:: on search.cpan.org.

Obviously, hardware-specific stuff won't work (e.g. modules for the Linux ALSA soundcard architecture), but apart from that, I haven't faced any Mac OS X-specific problems with Perl.

If you visit any Perl workshops or conferences, look out for lots of PowerBooks . Seems the Perl community is hooked on Mac OS X, even a number of Parrot and Perl 6 developers use it.

 

[darraghsmyth]

Thanks for information.

In particular, I tend to use OS-level forking and packages like:

LWP::UserAgent
Crypt::SSLeay
HTTP::Cookies
MIME::Lite

for automated web transfer stuff. So as long as they're supported, I'd be grand. Thrilled to hear that Perl is taking off on OS X

darragh

 

[crenz]

Just for fun, I installed MIME::Lite, LWP and Crypt::SSLeay using CPANPLUS. They all passed the tests and installed without problems.

By the way, did you take a look at WWW::Automate already? That one is rather handy for automating web stuff. (I had trouble installing the newest version of that one, though -- don't know why.)