Sawyer X

During our first day at the Perl Toolchain Summit (PTS-2017), Aaron Crane and I just released Ref::Util 0.200 and Ref::Util::XS, which constitute the next planned major release of Ref::Util. Yup, it now has Pure-Perl and optional XS. Read on.

Ref::Util was written as an XS module (in fact, two different implementations in XS) contributing to its speed and success. However, it is only available in XS, forcing users to commit to a mandatory XS requirement. Until now.

The new version of Ref::Util provides a Pure-Perl implementation of all its functions. All the XS implementation has been moved to - surprise - Ref::Util::XS. Ref::Util will attempt to both install and use Ref::Util::XS if possible.

This allows code to use Ref::Util syntax without requiring XS, and allowing users to install Ref::Util::XS to speed it up.

Thanks, Karen Etheridge (ETHER) and Graham Knop (HAARG) for help in doing this.

This work was made possible thanks to our sponsors, who made the Perl Toolchain Summit a reality: Booking.com, ActiveState, cPanel, FastMail, MaxMind, Perl Careers, MongoDB, SureVoIP, Campus Explorer, Bytemark, CAPSiDE, Charlie Gonzalez, Elastic, OpusVL, Perl Services, Procura, Oetiker+Partner.

Our next releases will include documentation clean ups, to clarify this change.