Get in loser. We're rewinding the stack

Re:Get in loser. We're rewinding the stack by tantalor on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @07:24PM (#43020190)

Comment obviously meant "port" as in "to another programming language".

> only other option is a rewrite

If you mean by hand, not necessarily, you could use a "code converter" tool to do the rewrite automatically. But it may be impractical; perl is a notoriously difficult language to work with.

Perl is pretty close to Ruby and Python; those may be the most obvious candidates.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Get in loser. We're rewinding the stack by cthor on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @09:58PM (#43021335)

There are no programs that will fully transpile Perl to not-Perl, because that would require parsing Perl.

A code converter that kindof-sortof-but-not-really transpiles (like Python's 2to3) would require a lot of debugging of ugly machine generated source code. Who wants to do that? Would probably be even harder than a full rewrite. (How many Python libraries were actually ported using 2to3?) Similar for using any translation an LLM might spit out.

So yes, by hand. And it's not obvious if a full rewrite of a complex library would be easier than porting its runtime to WASM, especially when said runtime has been ported to countless other systems already.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Get in loser. We're rewinding the stack by ab5tract on Wednesday February 12, 2025 @02:56AM (#43022973)

English is a notoriously difficult language to work with. Should we be translating all of our English to Esperanto?

[ Parent | on HN ]