is there any chance for this to get ported to Perl5 too?

[tux99]

I have always wanted to use portMIDI with Perl5 but lack the skills to write such a wrapper myself. I just found out about this Perl6 portMIDI wrapper and was wondering if there is any chance of getting this ported to Perl5 too?

I have no experience with Perl6 myself so I have no idea if this is doable or not.

[timo]

There's Inline::Perl6 for Perl5 with which you can use Perl6 modules as if they were Perl5 modules. You could try that, for example.

[jonathanstowe]

I'm actually surprised that there isn't already a binding in Perl 5 to be honest.

My quick survey would indicate that people have gone straight to the underlying interfaces which PortMIDI abstracts away., so there is https://metacpan.org/pod/MIDI::ALSA for Linux, https://metacpan.org/pod/Win32API::MIDI for Windows, https://metacpan.org/pod/Mac::CoreMIDI for Mac and so on.

The thing about implementing for Perl 5 is that it almost certainly would require a fairly large XS/C wrapper which, because of the excellent design of the native interface, isn't necessary with Perl 6. So it wouldn't really be a matter of "Porting" it to Perl 5, rather completely implementing it from scratch.

But yeah you could try what @timo suggests, I have no idea whether it would work or not though.

[tux99]

Thanks about pointing me to Inline::Perl6, I will look into that.

I have used MIDI::ALSA and Win32API::MIDI already (Mac::CoreMIDI is so incomplete that it's useless in its current state) but using these platform-specific modules requires me to write platform-specific code for each OS (see my github page for a few programs I wrote that use these).

A Perl5 binding for portMIDI would make cross-platform MIDI programs so much easier to write.

[jonathanstowe]

Or y'know come over to the dark side and just use Perl 6 :)

[tux99]

Now that I have discovered that a Perl6 wrapper for portMIDI exists I might actually be tempted to try Perl6 for some new project, but porting my existing Perl5 programs (thousands of lines of code) to Perl6 is probably too much work.

[jonathanstowe]

👍 You'll be surprised to be honest, most of the code that I have rewritten in Perl 6 has come out around half the size. Also @drforr has made a fairly reasonable "brute-force" translator at https://github.com/drforr/Perl-Mogrify.

Another approach to allow for gradual transformation is to use Inline::Perl5 and if your code is sufficiently well encapsulated you can re-do parts in Perl 6 as you go along.

Have fun.

[jonathanstowe]

I'm going to close this on the grounds that it's not really an issue with this module at all.