[Libguestfs] Libguestfs with Perl 6 :-)

I saw the latest parrot release notice on LWN this week and randomly wondered the Perl6 native call interface was like compared to the horrific mess that is Perl5 XS. The answer is that it is a thing of beauty ! Here is the libguestfs hello world example in Perl6 $ dd if=/dev/zero of=guest.img bs=1M count=100 $ mke2fs guest.img $ cat guestfs.p6 use NativeCall; say "Defining stubs"; sub guestfs_create() returns OpaquePointer is native('libguestfs') {} sub guestfs_add_drive(OpaquePointer $handle, Str $path) returns Int is native('libguestfs') {} sub guestfs_launch(OpaquePointer $handle) returns Int is native('libguestfs') {} sub guestfs_mount(OpaquePointer $handle, Str $path, Str $target) returns Int is native('libguestfs') {} sub guestfs_touch(OpaquePointer $handle, Str $path) returns Int is native('libguestfs') {} sub guestfs_umount(OpaquePointer $handle, Str $path) returns Int is native('libguestfs') {} sub guestfs_shutdown(OpaquePointer $handle) returns Int is native('libguestfs') {} sub guestfs_close(OpaquePointer $handle) returns Int is native('libguestfs') {} say "Creating handle"; my $g = guestfs_create(); say "Adding drive"; guestfs_add_drive($g, "guest.img"); say "Launching appliance"; guestfs_launch($g); say "Mounting root"; guestfs_mount($g, "/dev/sda", "/"); say "Touching hello"; guestfs_touch($g, "/hello"); say "Unmounting root"; guestfs_umount($g, "/"); say "Shutting down appliance"; guestfs_shutdown($g); say "Closing handle"; guestfs_close($g); $ perl6 guestfs.p6 Defining stubs Creating handle Adding drive Launching appliance Mounting root Touching hello Unmounting root Shutting down appliance Closing handle $ su - # mount -o loop /home/berrange/guest.img /mnt/ # ls /mnt/ hello lost+found Obviously for real world usage, we'd want to have the generator create a module containing all the stub definitions. I've at least answered my curiosity now :-) If only someone would port the Perl6 'NativeCall' module to Perl5, we could kill of the XS horrificness there too Regards, Daniel -- |: http://berrange.com -o- http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: http://entangle-photo.org -o- http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|