=head1 NAME
-perlfaq3 - Programming Tools ($Revision: 1.17 $, $Date: 2002/04/08 15:39:59 $)
+perlfaq3 - Programming Tools ($Revision: 1.22 $, $Date: 2002/05/06 13:11:13 $)
=head1 DESCRIPTION
=item The Object System
-(http://www.castlelink.co.uk/object_system/) is a Perl web
+( http://www.castlelink.co.uk/object_system/ ) is a Perl web
applications development IDE, apparently for any platform
that runs Perl.
( http://helpconsulting.net/visiperl/ )
From Help Consulting, for Windows.
+=item OptiPerl
+
+( http://www.optiperl.com/ ) is a Windows IDE with simulated CGI
+environment, including debugger and syntax highlighting editor.
+
=back
For Windows there's also the
Only". You can also download text editors designed
specifically for programming, such as Textpad
( http://www.textpad.com/ ) and UltraEdit
-( http://www.ultraedit.com ), among others.
+( http://www.ultraedit.com/ ), among others.
If you are using MacOS, the same concerns apply. MacPerl
(for Classic environments) comes with a simple editor.
-Popular external editors are BBEdit ( http://www.bbedit.com )
-or Alpha ( http://alpha.olm.net/ ). MacOS X users can use Unix
-editors as well.
+Popular external editors are BBEdit ( http://www.bbedit.com/ )
+or Alpha ( http://www.kelehers.org/alpha/ ). MacOS X users can
+use Unix editors as well.
=over 4
see http://www.cpan.org/authors/Tom_Christiansen/scripts/toms.exrc.gz ,
the standard benchmark file for vi emulators. The file runs best with nvi,
the current version of vi out of Berkeley, which incidentally can be built
-with an embedded Perl interpreter--see http://www.cpan.org/src/misc .
+with an embedded Perl interpreter--see http://www.cpan.org/src/misc/ .
=head2 Where can I get perl-mode for emacs?
For "big" data stores (i.e. ones that exceed available memory) consider
using one of the DB modules to store it on disk instead of in RAM. This
-will incur a penalty in access time, but that's probably better that
+will incur a penalty in access time, but that's probably better than
causing your hard disk to thrash due to massive swapping.
=back
=head2 How can I free an array or hash so my program shrinks?
-You can't. On most operating systems, memory allocated to a program
-can never be returned to the system. That's why long-running programs
-sometimes re-exec themselves. Some operating systems (notably,
-FreeBSD and Linux) allegedly reclaim large chunks of memory that is no
-longer used, but it doesn't appear to happen with Perl (yet). The Mac
-appears to be the only platform that will reliably (albeit, slowly)
-return memory to the OS.
-
-We've had reports that on Linux (Redhat 5.1) on Intel, C<undef
-$scalar> will return memory to the system, while on Solaris 2.6 it
-won't. In general, try it yourself and see.
+You usually can't. On most operating systems, memory
+allocated to a program can never be returned to the system.
+That's why long-running programs sometimes re-exec
+themselves. Some operating systems (notably, systems that
+use mmap(2) for allocating large chunks of memory) can
+reclaim memory that is no longer used, but on such systems,
+perl must be configured and compiled to use the OS's malloc,
+not perl's.
However, judicious use of my() on your variables will help make sure
that they go out of scope so that Perl can free up that space for
http://perl.apache.org/
With the FCGI module (from CPAN) and the mod_fastcgi
-module (available from http://www.fastcgi.com/) each of your Perl
+module (available from http://www.fastcgi.com/ ) each of your Perl
programs becomes a permanent CGI daemon process.
Both of these solutions can have far-reaching effects on your system