Gaal Yahas wrote:
>  On Wed, Jun 08, 2005 at 12:29:33PM -0700, Larry Wall wrote:
>  
> >There will certainly be an event manager for all sorts of events floating
> >around in Perl 6.  The main trick will be to hide this from the people
> >who aren't interested.  The other trick will be to actually spec it,
> >since up till now I've assumed that it should be specced by the people
> >who are actually into that sort of thing.  Looks like you're one of
> >them.  :-)
>  
>  
>  There's the touchy issue of what minimum compatibility level we're
>  promising to deliver on all platforms. This is an issue in pugs already,
>  where Windows GHC isn't compiled with POSIX libraries so we're stumped on
>  the interface for even relatively basic things, such as how (or whether)
>  File.open might offer O_EXCL.
>  
>  Is part of the vision something like the explicit cross-platform nature
>  of Java? Will I be able to write Perl6 code with a certain flag that
>  possibly limits my choice of modules/builtins, but which promises me
>  identical behavior on all supported platforms?
>  
>  To take a notorious example, you mentioned fork() -- if this event manager
>  becomes part of Perl6, does that mean we're required to emulate fork()
>  on win32?

Your point is well taken. Hell, even I was debating generalising even 
further from "fork" to "preload". As in, having Perl emit an event which 
says "Hey everybody, now would be a _really_ good time to load 
everything in, because after we $whatever, it's going to be a lot more 
expensive to load them in at run-time that to just load them now and 
benefit from copy-on-write/threads/whatever."

Sort of a "disable run-time loading and load stuff now" event.

The reason I wanted a ten lines of code solution is so that the 
fork()-on-win32 issue is less of a problem.

If perl itself ONLY does (in p5 term)...

Some::EventManager-> fire('prefork') if $INC{"Some/EventManager.pm"};

..then it would matter less whether or not fork ever happens on Win32.

The preload.pm module would simply register with Some::EventManager for 
a different set of events depending on which platform it is on. 
prefork.pm as it exists for P5 today doesn't _really_ care about fork(). 
What it _really_ wants to know is "Should I run-time load or not? Tell 
me when we need to stop run-time loading".

Some::EventManager might be part of the core, but it certainly wouldn't 
be loaded by default. It's just a normal module that gets loaded when 
someone needs to use it.

I'm a minimalist. I want something to does the absolute least amount of 
work needed to let me know about events I simply can't find out about 
any other way, and that perhaps we can add additional events to later.

I certainly DON'T want something big enough and heavy enough to be able 
to write Aspect.pm on top of.