April 2009 Archives

First Perl 6 experiences part 2

When I first looked at this Sunday night I promised myself I'd spend no more than an hour or two on it. Well that went right out of the window :/

My initial aim was to get it working on Vista and run as CGI on IIS. This didn't work. I've spent the last 3 days playing about with it and testing out a load of things to find out why. Eventually with the help of the good people on IRC #perl6 and #parrot we found the problem and came up with a fix. Here are some of the details...

Following on from my last post, the people of the perl6-compiler@perl.org mailing list pointed me to a Rakudo build fix so I was able to build perl.exe by running mingw32-make. This has now been patched into Rakudo on github so if you are following this you shouldn't have the issue I had.

Playing with Rakudo on the command prompt I made my first hello world script 'saved as hello.p6':-

#!c:/temp/rakudo/perl6.exe
say( 'hello' );

And ran it with 'perl6 hello.p6'.

Following that I prepared a version for CGI that included the content-type header:-

#!c:/temp/rakudo/perl6.exe
say( "Content-Type: text/html\r\n\r" ); # say adds the last \n
say( 'hello' );

I checked this on the command prompt to make sure it was outputting properly and it was. Now to setup with IIS.

First Perl 6 experiences


Ok. I've been telling myself I can look at Perl 6 after I've finished my big project... But I just can't wait. I'm going to have a go at installing it on my Vista 32 laptop, and getting it working through CGI with IIS7.

Getting Rakudo

The Rakudo site has an easy looking guide.

I'm still very new to git, so rather than faf about trying to remember how to use it, I'm just going to download the tarball from:-
http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/tree/master

Unzipped it to c:\temp and renamed the long rakudo-rakudo-xxxxxxxxx folder to just 'rakudo'.

cd c:\temp\rakudo
perl Configure.pl --gen-parrot

Error:
Generating Parrot ...
C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe build/gen_parrot.pl

The system cannot find the path specified.
Checking out Parrot r37869 via svn...
'svn' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.