Dear Perl User,

Will you help Perl 6 development by sending a single email?

There's a new trick in development to support combined use of Perl 6 and Perl 5. It uses the PMC (Perl Module Compiled) feature, that so far has not been used much.

However, it has come to our attention that some packagers have disabled this feature, by supplying the PERL_DISABLE_PMC flag, probably for the tiny performance overhead.

We're trying to find out how wide spread the use of this flag is. If we want upgrading to Perl 6 to be gradual, I think this it is essential to convince packagers that they need to change their defaults.

To test if your packager has disabled the feature explicitly,

    perl -V:ccflags
[download]

and see if PERL_DISABLE_PMC is in there. So far, only Mandriva Linux uses it, to our knowledge. They have already agreed to change it in the next version.

To test if this feature works for your Perl, use:

    echo print uc ok > pmctest.pmc
    perl -Mpmctest -le1
[download]

You should get "OK". Please send the output of the test and of "perl -V" to pmc@perlcabal.org (even if it works), and let us know what platform you use.

You will not receive replies, and your address will not be used for any other purposes than to ask you more about this specific issue. When we're done, all messages will be removed.

Thank you for helping.

Regards,

Freenode #perl6

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Notes:

• This PMC has nothing to do with Parrot Magic Cookies
• See http://pugs.blogs.com/ for the guts of this hack
• Filter::PMC is already renamed to Module::Compile

Updates:

• Changed "test" to "pmctest" because Win32 is case insensitive and the cwd is LAST in @INC
• Please also mail the output of the test