[9fans] Java, ML, C++, and Perl Languages on Plan9?

[9fans] Java, ML, C++, and Perl Languages on Plan9?

[Stephen Wynne]

People are asking me if these languges are available on Plan9. I'd
imagine there's an SML port used internally at the Labs, and I thought
I'd read about Kaffe. I'm imagining that Perl could be gotten working
with APE and a lot of hacking...

Re: [9fans] Java, ML, C++, and Perl Languages on Plan9?

[Howard Trickey]

> People are asking me if these languges are available on Plan9. I'd
> imagine there's an SML port used internally at the Labs, and I thought
> I'd read about Kaffe. I'm imagining that Perl could be gotten working
> with APE and a lot of hacking...

Sean Dorward and then I worked on making SML run on Plan 9,
on the Sparc and Mips architecture, but not the Intel one, and also
not since SML version 108.  A fair amount of assembly hacking
was required, not trivial, since Plan 9 assemblers take a different
format than the standard assemblers for various architectures.
If anyone wants to do the (fairly substantial) amount of work necessary
to make it run on an Intel with the current version of SML, let
me know and I can send what we did here as a starting point.

Someone (sorry, forgotten the name) make Perl work on the
previous version of Plan 9, and I think the changes for Plan 9
made it into the Perl source (don't know if they're still there though).

Howard Trickey

Re: [9fans] Java, ML, C++, and Perl Languages on Plan9?

[Russ Cox]

Someone (don't remember who) did the work to
get Perl 5 to compile on Plan 9 ``out of the box'',
where out of the box isn't quite that, but close.

I was toying with porting SML/NJ but it was a
bigger project than I wanted at the time.
I did get Moscow ML, which uses a bytecode
interpreter, running pretty well.

I plan to wrap both of these up later,
perhaps this weekend.

Russ

Re: [9fans] Java, ML, C++, and Perl Languages on Plan9?

[rob pike]

Java is a big deal to get working because in a failure of vision we
made the file name elements too short.  It's a project rising fast
on our to-do list to fix that problem and then we'll be able to
port Java, which has its own failure of vision in requiring long
names in the file system.

SML is available locally but the Plan 9 port is quite old.  I'll sniff
around and see if I can get the ML folks to update it.

Someone did get Perl going a long time ago, if I remember right,
but I don't remember who.

-rob