External Object Support in Perl

Jan Dubois

ActiveState Tool Corp.

Thursday, 1:30 PM in McConomy.

Perl provides reasonable support for object oriented programming within the language.  Access to external objects (COM/CORBA/XPCOM/etc) however is only provided through additional modules.  This means that the compiler cannot help with early binding to method calls nor can it verify the correct spelling of property names.  And at runtime there is an additional layer of lookups and indirection involved.

This talk presents a proposal for a generic external object mechanism for Perl.  It will provide access to type libraries during compilation and dynamically definable opcodes for runtime dispatch.  Some of the issues covered are support for optional strong typing, memory layout for classes/structures, calling (potentially overloaded) class and instance
methods and accessing class and instance variables.  These techniques could also be used to access arbitrary code from platform specific shared libraries.

The outlook will be on defining "external" components in Perl and inheriting from existing ones.
 

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