[ruby-talk:10484] Re: Stealing some Perl infrastructure

Phil Tomson wrote:

# I was looking at some Win32 perl modules on CPAN recently -
# specifically, I need some functionality that is provided by perl's
# Win32::GuiTest module.  From what I can tell, most of the code
# involved is actually C code - they have C wrappers of some Win32
# system calls, etc. and then they build on them - mostly all in C,
# only one of the funtions was actually written in Perl.  But there's
# a catch, the code they provide is actually not the original C code ,
# but the .xs files which are presumably read by XS (kind of like
# SWIG, but specifically for extending Perl). 
# 
# Now, I could be wrong, but the XS code (somecode.xs) looks mostly
# like C code with some added tags.  Might it not be possible (and
# somebody who is more familiar with XS than I could shed some light
# here) to take the .xs files and munge them somehow to create Ruby
# extentions - or at least to make them readable from SWIG and then
# create Ruby modules from that direction.  It seems like doing this
# could get us a good number of Perl modules (at least where the
# modules rely heavily on C code) fairly quickly. 

Well, I strongly object to calling that stealing, even in jest. As I'm 
sure Larry Wall would be quick to point out, it's *open* *source* 
software!

But anyway, what you suggest seems like a Great Idea (tm), IMHO (albeit an 
uninformed one in this case).

Does anyone know if anyone in Python land has tried something along these 
lines? 

Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)