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List:       linux-ha-dev
Subject:    Re: [Linux-ha-dev] PERL Aproach
From:       Alan Robertson <alanr () bell-labs ! com>
Date:       1999-11-06 13:19:19
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Ron Burton wrote:
> 
>     One issue that seems to be of some concern is the ability of HA
> solutions to operate across various hardware and OSs.   I know this is
> the Linux-HA project, but I am curious if any thought is actively gone
> into this situation.  I see it being more of a issue with Linux than
> with other platforms, as many people will be moving to Linux as a low
> cost solution, often to augment their already existing platforms.

Heartbeat has been ported to FreeBSD (although there is a small patch that isn't
incorporated yet).  I suspect it will port to other systems fairly easily also. 
I thought seriously about using Perl at one point, but decided on C because of
many experiences over a long period of time of minor flakiness in Perl itself,
and the relative size and speed of Perl solutions.  If there is even one memory
leak in the interpreter, then as it runs over time this will be unacceptable. 
Finding and fixing such a leak would become our problem.  So would documenting
every version that had this leak, and detecting whether or not any given
installation had the leak.

The "portability" problems in heartbeat are things which will not likely improve
in Perl:  Things like adding an alias, detecting whether an alias is currently
active or not are things that change from system to system, and are not likely
to be covered by Perl's many excellent modules.

However, there are many things in Linux-HA which are not yet completed, and one
of the components which we are likely to use is already in Perl.  For
diagnostics, we're likely going to use Mon, which is written in Perl.  This
would have the advantage of adding to what is being done instead of duplicating
it.

	-- Alan Robertson
	   alanr@bell-labs.com

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