MacPerl Development

Welcome to the home of MacPerl development. MacPerl, the Mac OS port of Larry Wall's programming language Perl is available as both a standalone application, and as an MPW tool. It was written by Matthias Neeracher, and is currently maintained by Chris Nandor.

NOTE: Pretty much everything on this page hasn't been touched in 15 years, except for the bit about the book.

Book

It's 2017! To commemorate 19 years since its publication, the book MacPerl: Power and Ease [download] is now available for download as a PDF, for free. Written by Vicki Brown and Chris Nandor, and edited by Rich Morin, this PDF format was recreated from the original manuscript but with updated and colorized screen shots, using an old PowerBook G3.

Current Release

MacPerl 5.6 has been released. The current release of MacPerl is 5.6.1r2 (2002.12.04), based on perl 5.6.1, which is the most recent release of perl. The current development release is 5.8.0a2 (2002.06.22), based on perl 5.8.0 RC 2, which is the release candidate for the next release of perl.

There is no specific timeline for MacPerl 5.8.0. It will likely go to beta sometime in the first quarter of 2003.

MacPerl Development

If you would like to build MacPerl yourself, please read the Build Instructions. See much of what is going on over at the MacPerl SourceForge.net site.

The source for MacPerl is available via anonymous CVS, and is also available on the main perl repository in the maint-5.6/macperl (5.6), maint-5.8/macperl (5.8), and macperl (5.9/5.10) branches.

Contact

For questions about MacPerl, use the MacPerl mailing lists (also available on nntp.perl.org or another NNTP server near you). For bug reports, use the MacPerl bugs page. When you submit bug reports.

Please direct general Perl questions and bug reports -- questions and bug reports not specific to MacPerl, but to Perl in general -- not to the MacPerl places, but to the appropriate places for Perl itself.

Mac OS X

MacPerl runs under the Classic environment on Mac OS X. There are currently no plans to port it to Carbon. Unix perl runs just fine under Mac OS X. There are plans underway to have the Toolbox modules (Mac::Windows, Mac::Events) Carbonized so the same GUI-based MacPerl programs can run on both platforms. There is a separate mailing list for perl on Mac OS X.

perl 6

perl 6 is a complete rewrite of perl, currently under development. There are no specific plans to port it to Mac OS. When perl 6 gets moving more, and there's an alpha etc., maybe there will be.

Other Links

• The MacPerl Pages - tutorials, MacPerl book, articles, etc.
• MacPerl at pudge.net - software, links
• use Perl; - Perl news and discussion
• use MacPerl; - Thomas Wegner's MacPerl site, with XS tutorials, modules, etc.
• Perl Bugs - bug database for main perl
• Perl Mailing Lists - All known Perl/MacPerl mailing lists