Linking languages

Question

I asked a question earlier about which language to use for an AI prototype. The consensus seemed to be that if I want it to be fast, I need to use a language like Java or C+

Answer 1

If you choose Perl there are plenty of resources for interfacing other languages.

Inline::C
Inline::CPP
Inline::Java

From Inline::C-Cookbook:

use Inline C => <<'END_C';

  void greet() {
    printf("Hello, world\n");
  }
END_C

greet;

---

With Perl 6 it gets even easier to import subroutine from native library code using NativeCall.

use v6.c;

sub c-print ( Str() $s ){
  use NativeCall;

  # restrict the function to inside of this subroutine because printf is
  # vararg based, and we only handle '%s' based inputs here

  # it should be possible to handle more but it requires generating
  # a Signature object based on the format string and then do a
  # nativecast with that Signature, and a pointer to printf

  sub printf ( str, str --> int32 ) is native('libc:6') {}

  printf '%s', $s
}

c-print 'Hello World';

This is just a simple example, you can create a class that has a representation of a Pointer, and have some of the methods be C code from the library you are using. ( only works if the first argument of the C code is the pointer, otherwise you would have to wrap it )

If you need the Perl 6 subroutine/method name to be different you can use the is symbol trait modifier.

There are also Inline modules for Perl 6 as well.