[OT] perl and CLRs (.NET rocks)

[Benjamin Smith]

On Wed, May 02, 2007 at 02:17:32PM +0100, Dirk Koopman wrote:
> However, anybody that does "scripting" in either of these two languages 
> is missing the point (as well as being a potential RSI victim). This is 
> why I am, very gently, agitating for my favourite scripting language to 
> have standard backend, preferably .NET/Mono but I could live with JVM.

It doesn't matter what your favourite scripting language compiles to,
but what RPC mechanisms it's integrated with.  

For example, there's already Win32::OLE that allows you to call
applications like Microsoft Excel.  There's also Mac::Glue that connects
to Apple's equivalent.  Neither of these requires perl to produce VBA
or AppleScript.

When Microsoft's technology was COM, you could write a component in C++
compiling it to a DLL plus a big blob of metadata, and then be able to
call it from VB, with the VB using the metadata to understand what
methods, attributes, and events were offered by the C++.

So, perl doesn't need a .NET/Mono backend, it just needs to tie into the
.NET introspection and RPC systems.  (After all perl already happily
talks SOAP and dbus to .NET/Mono.)

-- 
Benjamin Smith <bsmith at cabbage.org.uk>