Eww

For a project at work, I needed to write some application that would talk to sockets and store some state.

• Doing plain text files would be too much work (I need to parse the state afterwards, too)
• Doing a database server would be too fragile given the requirements of the system
• I don't like the SQLite API
• I don't fully know the libdb C API; but from what I remember when I last looked at it, I find it too cumbersome
• The Perl libdb API is just fine, especially if one uses use MLDBM, so I was planning to use that.
• Doing select() in perl conflicts with using the buffered PerlIO
• I didn't like the prospect of having to use Perl's sysread

So, I was facing a dilemma here: either use the cumbersome C API to libdb, or try to figure out a way to be able to talk to many sockets all at once from perl while still being able to use buffered PerlIO.

I chickened out.

wouter@country:~$ perldoc perlembed

Fast forward half a day, and I now have an application that will use perl to talk to libdb, and that will use C to talk to a number of sockets.

I feel dirty now. But it seems to work...