Perl embedding: trial balloon

I would like you folks' comments on the possibility of porting Perlmacs (an embedding of Perl in GNU Emacs) to XEmacs. This should probably take the form of a DLL, but an option for pre-dump loading would be desirable, too. Information about Perlmacs is at http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/id/JTOBEY/. Judging by a brief look at the XEmacs source, a Perl embedding will not be too difficult, but before I decide whether to work on one, I want to propose some extensions to the XEmacs API. Also, I would like to guage the likelihood that Perl support would be accepted into the standard distribution. A perl-interpreter type and a perl-thing type can be lrecords. I gather that lrecords consist essentially of an opaque pointer and a pointer to a struct lrecord_implementation. Perlmacs uses something similar, though not as well-developed. However, Perlmacs' extensible type has two features which lrecords appear to lack. One is polymorphism. Instead of a constant string stored directly in the virtual table, it has a type_of method which returns a Lisp_Object. This helps reduce the number of vtables needed to distinguish among types of Perl things, because Perl data already knows its type. I propose adding a type_of method and using it whenever "name" is found to be null. The other feature is a "call" method which is invoked when a Perl coderef appears in the car of an evaluated list: Lisp_Object (*call) P_ ((Lisp_Object self, int nargs, Lisp_Object *args)); This avoids some consing when importing Perl functions. For example, instead of (lambda (&rest args) (apply 'perl-call #<perl-code 0x12345678> args)) you can have simply #<perl-code 0x12345678> in the function cell. Finally, I am curious to know whether anyone has proposed making XEmacs namespace-clean. This is important for programs that do dynamic loading. Perl itself is namespace-clean, but it may load modules that are not. At the moment, Perlmacs is not namespace-clean, but it is a priority. I ask these things because I am faced with an either-or choice. There is little chance of FSF accepting the Perlmacs patch. Either I will continue working on the Emacs-based Perlmacs, or I will abandon it for XEmacs. Thanks -John