Hacker News Reader

Comment by space_ghost | Hacker News Reader

The Windows build environment uses Perl?

You 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-iph...

I’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.)

Honestly, yes. And based on your username I'm surprised you weren't as well. ;)

vbscript is awesome :P

Last I heard, Apple uses Linux for bringup of their silicon in addition to–and sometimes even before–XNU.

Makes 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.

> XP was released in 2002

2001, actually.

Indeed. 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

Yes 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.

Doesn'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.

I suppose it shouldn't surprise me, I'd just expect Microsoft to eat a little more of their own dogfood.

This was fairly normal at Microsoft for years. Even the first .net framework (rotor) used Perl as a build system and worked on Unix systems.

Yep. Windows has been largely built, at least until the Win8 Era, via `make` and `perl`. What a world.

The Symbian build system was Perl too.

Doesn't the Linux build system use perl as well?

According 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/2324d50d051ec0f14a548...

That was added 11 years ago(!!) so it may be out of date.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?q=perl

Not 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).

Last I knew, OpenSSL required perl to build.

Still does.

What about Git? Last I knew, it required Perl to build.

Git is partially written in perl.

It also links to libssl which requires perl to build.

i just built nginx yesterday, and i needed perl for at least a couple of the static modules i added...

That's right. Flex and bison is required, but no perl. No idea where that notion came from.

Developer scripts (checkpatch etc.) are written in perl, though it's not required for builds.

Probably 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!

https://www.sqlite.org/draft/howtocompile.html

There's some tcl involved.

Perl 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").

If you're referring to Perl 6 versus Perl 5: that problem has been fixed by renaming Perl 6 to Raku (https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media).

Nope, it's a combo of makefiles (GNU flavour I think) and C called Kconfig.

Not anymore

Reply on news.ycombinator.com