10 ms·
The Windows build environment uses Perl?
by space_ghost 6y ago
The Windows build environment uses Perl?
- user5994461 6y agoMakes sense. XP was released in 2002 and took years of work before the release. A good chunk of languages we take for granted today did not exist at that time, or were in the very first release. Perl came out in 1987, it was quite the thing in the late 90s.
- muterad_murilax 6y ago> XP was released in 2002 2001, actually.
- rchaud 6y agoIndeed. There is an episode of the sitcom Frasier (set in Seattle) featuring Bill Gates, that aired in Nov 2001. Gates appears on Frasier's call-in radio show, but all the calls end up being tech support related. Gates comments on whether Windows XP needs a boot disk or not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpRiDl48ERA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpRiDl48ERA
- INTPenis 6y agoYes it makes sense from a technical standpoint but I was amused by this fact because Microsoft is supposed to be a vendor of programming languages and operating systems. And to build their own OS they go to the world of open source. So it's a neat confirmation of the power of open source over proprietary software.
- HarryHirsch 6y agoDoesn't the Linux build system use perl as well?
- movaps 6y agoNope, it's a combo of makefiles (GNU flavour I think) and C called Kconfig.
- rkeene2 6y agoNot really. I created and maintained a Linux distribution, and while Perl was sometimes used it was almost never strictly required (i.e., it was for documentation or something that really would have been better if the release maintainer had already generated....). This covers a few hundred packages, like gcc, binutils, glibc, linux, core-utils, util-linux, flex, ... Notable, also, is that I didn't compile perl for my Linux distribution because perl's configuration system is terrible (there's an out-of-tree patch to make it less terrible, though).
- HarryHirsch 6y agoThat's right. Flex and bison is required, but no perl. No idea where that notion came from.
- kasabali 6y agoDeveloper scripts (checkpatch etc.) are written in perl, though it's not required for builds.
- HarryHirsch 6y agoProbably beats python and the continuous version idiocy - Python 2 vs Python 3, 3.7 vs 3.9 &c, p.p. If you have throwaway scripts in a startup, fine, but unacceptable when you are maintaining an OS that all the world relies on. You wonder - what does Dr Hipp use for sqlite? Never looked into that build system!
- snazz 6y agohttps://www.sqlite.org/draft/howtocompile.html https://www.sqlite.org/draft/howtocompile.html There's some tcl involved.
- NationalPark 6y agoPerl has its own version naming problem. But there's no reason to think it would be any more stable or secure than Python, which is in the critical path of all sorts of things (not just "throwaway scripts in a startup").
- Daviey 6y agohttps://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?q=perl https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?q=perl
- pantalaimon 6y agoNot anymore
- cbsks 6y agoAccording to the Linux kernel documentation: "You will need perl 5 and the following modules: Getopt::Long, Getopt::Std, File::Basename, and File::Find to build the kernel." https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/2324d50d051ec0f14a548e78554fb02513d6dcef/Documentation/process/changes.rst https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/2324d50d051ec0f14a548... That was added 11 years ago(!!) so it may be out of date.
- vb6sp6 6y agoYou were expecting vbscript? There are tons of examples like this. My favorite is Apple using windows xp to make and test iphones https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-uses-windows-xp-in-iphone-testing-facility-2014-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-uses-windows-xp-in-iph...
- space_ghost 6y agoHonestly, yes. And based on your username I'm surprised you weren't as well. ;)
- vb6sp6 6y agovbscript is awesome :P
- iwasakabukiman 6y agoI’ve never understood this type of “gotcha!” that always gets trotted out when a company uses another company’s product to develop their own. If all of the debugging, testing and factory management tools are standardized on Windows - why rewrite them if you don’t need to? It seems like a waste of resources. (This isn’t limited to Apple or even technology companies. It applies to tons of businesses.)
- saagarjha 6y agoLast I heard, Apple uses Linux for bringup of their silicon in addition to–and sometimes even before–XNU.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y agoDoesn't surprise me. What else are you going to use? Batch? Python certainly hadn't caught on yet in the late 90's when XP was being written. In 2013 when I was interning for a company making an audio driver for Windows, we used Perl to run our builds. While I hate Perl, it does make it real easy to run an executable and analyze its output.
- space_ghost 6y agoI suppose it shouldn't surprise me, I'd just expect Microsoft to eat a little more of their own dogfood.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- qz2 6y agoThis was fairly normal at Microsoft for years. Even the first .net framework (rotor) used Perl as a build system and worked on Unix systems.
- anaisbetts 6y agoYep. Windows has been largely built, at least until the Win8 Era, via `make` and `perl`. What a world.
- secondcoming 6y agoThe Symbian build system was Perl too.