Tag: gist

Gist of the Day: Some convenience macros for use with Perl C internals

I feel awful. Like, really awful. The baby is sick, my partner is sick, I am sick. You still want something neat though, so I’m going to show you something very simple that I’ve used for a while.
As I’m sure you noticed in yesterday’s Inline::C demo, Perl guts and C API are pretty noisy with a lot of boiler-plate. For this reason, when I first started playing with Perl guts and API, I created a header file just to make things a little simpler. Nothing here is terribly complicated, and they’re all just simple convenience macros, but sometimes that type of macro saves you oodles of time. Continue reading Gist of the Day: Some convenience macros for use with Perl C internals

Gist of the Day: Inline::C in Perl

I like Perl and I like C (most of the time), and sometimes I like to mix the two. The two main reasons I might want to mix the two is for performance, or because something is written in C which I would like to use from Perl. I’ve only really ever used C from Perl, I’ve never used Perl from C. Today’s demonstration is how to implement a simple binary search algorithm in C, but using Perl internals, and calling the algorithm from Perl. Continue reading Gist of the Day: Inline::C in Perl

Gist of the Day: Simple Threading in Perl

So today’s gist is a simple example of how to do two different things with two separate threads. Threading in Perl is misunderstood and often belittled, but it’s pretty straight-forward. The #1 problem that I think people encounter when threading in Perl is that they are using non-thread-safe code. If you’re using a CPAN module, you need to make sure you evaluate it for thread-safety prior to running it with threads (and if it’s using XS, it likely isn’t).
Anyway, this gist takes a function which crunches a set using a calculation routine. The calculation routine takes three parameters:

  1. The value so far
  2. N
  3. And the next value in the set

From there, the calculation routine performs the appropriate action on the next value in the set – given the prior value and the value of N – and then returns the result.
Here’s the Gist: https://gist.github.com/manchicken/6349415