Nokia Release Series 60 Patch For Perl

It looks like Perl on Nokia Series 60 phones is getting closing as Jarkko Hietaniemi has just commited a patch to the Perl 5 Porters mailing list that enables Perl 5.8.x and Perl 5.9.x to work on Symbian smartphones. The message specifically states that it is known to work on Nokia Series 60 phones. The port is copyright Nokia.

I'm now officially very excited! Perl could very soon be running on my Nokia 6630!

A quick delve into the attached README reveals...

The attached patches enable compiling Perl on the Symbian OS platform: Symbian OS releases 7.0s and 8.0a; and the corresponding Series 60 SDKs 2.0, 2.1, and 2.6.

Note that the patches only implement a "base port", enabling one to run Perl on Symbian, the basic operating system platform. The patches do not implement any further Symbian OS or Series 60 (an application framework) bindings to Perl. (A small Symbian / Series 60 interface class and a small Series 60 application are included, though.)

It also seems that the patch allows Perl to be embedded into Series 60 C++ applications.

Since the primary way of using Perl on Symbian is a DLL (as described above), I also wrote a small wrapper class for Series 60 (C++) applications that want to embed a Perl interpreter, and a small Series 60 demonstration application (PerlApp) using that wrapper class. As a bonus PerlApp knows how to install Perl scripts (.pl, or hash-bang-perl) and Perl modules (.pm) from the messaging application's Inbox, and how to run scripts when invoked via a filebrowser (either the one builtin to PerlApp, or an external one).

It's fantastic to see that Nokia are working on getting Perl onto their smartphones. I've jealously looked on as Python developers have had their language implemented, now it seems that Perl could well be nearing an official launch.