OT: PerlQT

[Joe Smith <jes martnet com>]

Somewhat off-topic, but I just happend to notice that the Perl wrapper 
for Qt is alive and kicking: http://perlqt.infonium.com/

I decided to use Perl-Gtk about two years ago because 1) I just couldn't 
get my head around C++ and 2) PerlQt seemed to be a dead horse.  I'm 
happy to see that's not the case (well, I still don't grok C++) and 
there seems to be a complete wrapper for Qt3.

It's interesting to compare how they handled some things.  From a first 
look, there seems to be a good bit of weirdness (at least for someone 
coming from Perl).  E.g., widgets are constructed not by 'new' but using 
the bare class name, a la C++.  Also suprising: Perl widgets subclassed 
from Qt may provide virtual methods simply by defining a Perl sub with 
the same name.

Anyway, I have no time for any useful analysis, but these two lines 
popped out at me from the overview 
(http://perlqt.infonium.com/dist/current/doc/index.html):

> It is based on the SMOKE library, a language independent low-level
> wrapper generated from Qt headers by Richard Dale's kalyptus thanks to
> David Faure's module.

and

> When building a new composite widget, you may just create its
> different parts inside my variables, since widgets are only deleted by
> their parents and not necessarily when their container goes out of
> scope.
>
> In other words, PerlQt performs clever reference counting to prevent
> indesirable deletion of objects.

<Joe