$Id: README 0.12 2000/01/11 06:56:47 rurban Exp $ Tie::CArray A perl5 module for space-efficient typed external C Arrays Reini Urban rurban@x-ray.at INTRODUCTION Several XS classes and methods to deal with typed, space-efficient C arrays are provided. For the three basic C-types array of INT, DOUBLE and STRING and some sequential aggregate types int[2][], int[3][], int[4][], double[2][], double[3][] hand-optimized, fast XS versions are provided. This roughly reflects to: CArray CIntArray int[] CInt2Array int[][2] CInt3Array int[][3] CInt4Array int[][4] CDoubleArray double[] CDouble2Array double[][2] CDouble3Array double[][3] CStringArray *char[] External C arrays limit communication overhead with large simple data structures, where size or time constraints become serious, optionally manipulated by external XS modules. Such as various computional geometry modules dealing with 10.000 - 200.000 double[3]. Modification is done in-place and preferably in bulk. It might also be easier to write XSUBs by converting the data to CArray's before, pass this pointer to the C func, and handle the results in Perl then instead of writing wrappers just for C arrays. Not all perl array methods are provided since perl tie doesn't support the full range yet (i.e. no push, pop, shift, unshift, lvalue slice, ...). But there are efficient methods for grow, init, copy, delete, C++ style rvalue slice, indirect sort, destructive reverse and conversions between the raw and supported sequential types. Displaced arrays (mappings with arbitary offsets) and more attributes (fill-pointer, read-only, C++ gslice, ...) are not yet supported. See the file Changes for user-visible changes. See Tie::CArray.pm for usage. See Geometry::Points, Geometry::Delaunay for samples. Copyright (c) 1999 Reini Urban. This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. MODULE DESCRIPTION Name DSLI Description Info ------------- ---- -------------------------------------------- ----- Tie::CArray adpO Space-efficient, typed, external C Arrays RURBAN INSTALLATION C Prerequisites needed: Tie::Array (standard since 5.005) C compiler Tie::CArray installs as a standard Perl module: perl Makefile.pl make (resp. nmake, dmake) make test make clean make install Tested Platforms: Tie::CArray was developed under Win32 - MSVC6 - perl5.00502, 5.00558 w/wo threads/debugging and additionally tested with cygwin32 - gcc 2.95 - 5.00562. Please report other platforms to the author. I see no major difficulty for gcc supported platforms, though Win32 is less strict than others. No special platform-specific headers or libraries are used. This is alpha: Interface syntax for arbitrary structures by pack-style templates might change. Method names and arguments may change. Not fully tested yet!