Squawks of the Parrot

Now with perly goodness

Just cut a release of Tornado 0.04 -- http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/things/tornado-0.04.tar.gz. More fixed bugs and whatnot, but the fun new thing now is that the perl module (in the perl subdirectory) builds and tests, and that includes assembling a sample program, invoking it, and getting the results back. This is, I think, a pretty cool thing.

Unfortunately there's still some manual bits, like you have to copy the tornado shared library into the lib/ directory in the perl module's build directory when you're building and testing, but that's only because I've forgotten the Weird Magic needed to get MakeMaker to add in library paths and so I cheat. It's probably dead-simple, but for now this is easy enough, and I can write test driver programs in perl rather than having to abuse the main.c in the main tornado source directory. (Which is terribly inflexible)

That does work out, in its own way. Use the flexible language to do flexible things, the fast (I hope) engine to do the fast things, and let the glue code sort out the interfacing. The way things really ought to be, I think.