Writing C Modules with Inline::C

Getting Up Close and Personal

Inline::C supports a powerful tracing mechanism that can give you information 

about what it's doing while it's doing it. For example, if I call the preceding script 

with the command line parameter  MInline=INFO,FORCE,NOCLEAN, the following 

output is produced:

$ perl  MInline=INFO,FORCE,NOCLEAN ./inline.pl

<                       Information Section                                   >

Information about the processing of your Inline C code:

Your source code needs to be compiled. I ll use this build directory:

./_Inline/build/inline_pl_927a

and I ll install the executable as:

./_Inline/lib/auto/inline_pl_927a/inline_pl_927a.so

The following Inline C function(s) have been successfully bound to Perl:

               void japh()

<                       End of Information Section                            >

Just Another Perl Hacker.

The FORCE option tells Inline::C to compile the code even if it hasn't changed. The 

INFO option produces the output included earlier. As you can see, Inline::C is building 

in ./_Inline/build/inline_pl_927a. The compiled module (referred to as an 

executable) is created in this directory. Finally, Inline::C helpfully reports that a 

single function was successfully bound to Perl: void japh().

By specifying NOCLEAN, Inline::C leaves all its temporary files around for you to 

inspect. Entering the build directory, I find the following files:

$ cd _Inline/build/inline_pl_927a

$ ls

blib               inline_pl_927a.c   Makefile     out.Makefile_PL

INLINE.h           inline_pl_927a.o   Makefile.PL  out.make_install

inline_pl_927a.bs  inline_pl_927a.xs  out.make     pm_to_blib

All of these files are useful to understanding how Inline::C works, but the file 

out.make is of particular importance. It records the output of the compilation 

phase of your code. If you have a compilation error, Inline::C will output a message 

like this one:

23

239

9