August 2013 Archives

p5-MOP speedups, new traits and more ports

I recently took a vacation with my family and actually didn't spend any time working on p5-mop-redux (or any code for that matter) which was actually kind of nice (odd but nice). But thankfully Jesse Luehrs, my co-conspirator on the previous p5-mop attempt, found himself with some free time and so was hacking away. He ported one of his newest modules, Reply (which is a really nice REPL for Perl, you should try it) and noticed that the startup time was pretty slow (something important for a REPL). Of course this is to be expected in a prototype, but still, Jesse went and added this simple method cache which resulted in an almost 3x speedup for startup time.

Jesse also added two new class traits both of which are important for enabling users to subclass MOP based classes using non-MOP based classes.

Mapping the MOP to Moose

I spent much of last week on vacation with the family so very little actual coding got done on the p5-mop, but instead I did a lot of thinking. My next major goal for the p5-mop is to port a module written in Moose, in particular, one that uses many different Moose features. The module I have chosen to port is Bread::Board and I chose it for two reasons; first, it was the first real module that I wrote using Moose and second, it makes heavy use of a lot of Moose's features. I actually expect this port to be much more involved and require more actual design changes then the other ports have, simply because not all the Moose features used will be easily translated into MOP idioms. So in preparation for this I have been doing a lot of thinking about mapping the MOP to Moose and even started writing some documentation for it.

About Stevan Little

user-pic I blog about Perl.