Example #4 README

This is an example of how to include a statically linked extension into our proggie, with automatic bootstrap of the extension from within C space - so that Perl space user scripts don't have to explicitly `use' the extension, which they'd always have to otherwise, as long as they'd be intended to run in our custom embedded interpreter.

This example also uses a "private" build of Perl, rather than the system-wide build. Said "private" build resides in a dedicated subdirectory of the current directory of this README.
I have developed this scenario when I needed to build a custom Perl with support for threads (5.005-style posixish stuff).

More precisely, to save space, you have to provide the private Perl build yourselfs. The Makefile in this directory expects a subdirectory called


  perl5.005_03

with a built installation of perl


  tar xvzf perl5.005_03.tgz
  cd perl5.005_03
  ./Configure -Dusethreads -d
  make

This way, configure will only ask one question when producing config.sh, otherwise it will use defaults. It will report all the progress messages. To prevent Configure from bothering you at all, use "-des" instead of just "-d".

Note that patch_xs_makemaker now does some heavy modifications to the resulting $(Ext_Dir)/Makefile to force make to use the custom Perl build rather than the system-wide install.

This example does not actually use the threaded features yet.
This is to follow in the next iteration of this example.

References & credits:

`man perlembed`
`man perlxstut`
`man perlxs`
`man perlguts`
`man perlthrtut`
"Advanced Perl Programming", "Programming Perl", "Perl in a Nutshell", "Perl Cookbook" - all four from O'Reilly & Associates
the sources of Perl 5.005_03 and Perl 5.6.1, in particular ext/Thread/Thread.c (Damn. 5.8.0 is out just now - gotta take a look.)
"$PERL_SOURCE"/README.threads
`man gcc`
USENET newsgroups - several hints on how to compile Perl using a C++ compiler, what to do about -DBOOL=char, how to avoid the assert redefinition warning etc.