SPUG:Re: Korn Shell vs. PD-ksh

Richard Anderson richard at richard-anderson.org
Mon Feb 3 22:12:08 CST 2003


I really don't know for sure if the leaks are in the UWin code or the Win32
libraries, but I do know that the leaks remained even after the development
team worked on fixing some test cases I sent them.

The major jump in the UWin development path was from 1.x to 2.0 (around late
1999?), when UWin was modifed to call a Win32 C library that is supposed to
be a Posix-compliant implementation of the low-level C system subroutines.
The first ActiveState port of Perl was probably before this library was
available, so ActivePerl probably doesn't use it.  UWin contains a port of
Perl that is not ActiveState's - I haven't run any big Perl scripts with
this port, so can't comment on its behavior.

The ActivePerl port has been heavily used and tested thoroughly, so major
bugs have been fixed by now.  UWin is a small, non-for-profit product and is
less mature.
>
> "Richard Anderson" <richard at richard-anderson.org> writes:
>
> [...]
>
> > Running a big, complex ksh script may fail due to memory leaks in
> > the Windows libraries that UWin uses.  (But we are all using Perl
> > for anything longer than 50-100 lines, right?)
>
Michael R. Wolf" <MichaelRunningWolf at att.net> wrote:

> Does this imply that Perl doesn't leak?  If so, how did it get around
> the leaky Windows libraries that Uwin had to (or chose to) use?
>
> > I recommend UWin highly.  UWin works on post-95 Windows (Win98,
> > Win2K, WinXP, etc.)  The installation procedure is a bit odd, but it
> > works.  If you want the text man pages, be sure to install the groff
> > package.
>
Richard Anderson
richard at richard-anderson.org
www.richard-anderson.org
inm4taw




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