Why is there no IronPerl (Perl for .NET)?

Question

I'm a bit disappointed that there doesn't seem to be any effort to make Perl a first-class citizen of the .NET world.

I've read a few 'reasons' in the past, but I don't see why they can't be overcome (different garbage collectors, hard-to-parse syntax, part of CPAN modules couldn't be ported, different communities, ...).

Activestate has a Perl.NET product but it's a hack (in the good sense) around a standard interpreter and some syntactic sugar to interoperate with .NET assemblies.

A few years ago they stopped their Visual Studio integration of Perl citing lack of interest. That was a while ago, before all the changes to .NET to make it more 'dynamic'.

Am I the only one who yearns for IronPerl?

Answer 1

I feel your pain. There are plenty of times where I've wished for Perl's features in .NET, especially when it comes to text type files. However, I've been lucky in that the mantra 'right tool for the right job' has allowed me to use Perl at its best, and not worry about integrating it into .NET applications.

Edit: Having Strawberry Perl has been far more of a boon for me, and allowed me to call most Perl scripts from my Applications when needed, and not worry about direct integration.

Answer 2

Apparently it's not that hard to write a new .NET language.. I remember reading that LOLCODE was coded on a plane trip to a conference. On the other hand, Perl has a LOT of things that need to be implemented in order to be anywhere near compatible.

Answer 3

And while we are at it, why no JPerl (along the lines of Jython and JRuby)?

Answer 4

Perl 5 being underspecified is another problem. The situation is a bit better than it used to be, but in many cases the only way to know how something would work in Perl is to try it in perl.

Answer 5

Parrot has (or at least had) a project to do this. You can read an overview document.

Answer 6

I believe most of the .NET languages are parsed using straightforward Lex/Yacc combination.

But Perl, as a context-sensitive language, can't be parsed using a simple lexer/parser. This partly explains the origin of the phrase "only perl can parse Perl", and also explains why Perl autoindenters and code analyzers range in quality from terrible to laughably awful.

Answer 7

Too much exploded whale guts (link).

Answer 8

Because nobody's written it. If you want it, write it. It's just programming.