Toby Inkster

So I've created a programming language which blends a fairly JavaScript-like syntax with fairly Perl-like semantics, and a few other features that I haven't really seen in many programming languages.

This Perl:

use Path::Tiny;

my $str = uc(substr(Path::Tiny->new("myfile.txt")->slurp_utf8, 0, 80));

Becomes this in ZuzuScript:

from std/path import Path;

let str := new Path("myfile.txt")
  ▷ ^^.slurp_utf8
  ▷ ^^[0:80]
  ▷ uc ^^;

The ▷ operator means "evaluate the left side, then evaluate the right side with ^^ set to the result of the left side". It's conceptually similar to | in shells and seems to make a lot of expressions so much easier to understand.

(I make no apologies for the ChatGPT images in my recent blog posts, by the way. No artists are missing out on being paid: I wasn’t going to hire an artist to illustrate these blog posts which will be read by like three people.)

A while back, I wrote MooseX::XSAccessor which you can add to Moose classes to inspect your attributes and try to replace the accessors with faster XS-based ones. Now I’ve done the same for constructors (new) and destructors (DESTROY) with MooseX::XSConstructor.

There are probably still bugs, but initial benchmarks look promising:

When I first introduced Marlin, it seemed the only OO framework which could beat its constructor in speed was the one generated by the new Perl core class keyword. Which seems fair, as that’s implemented in C and is tightly integrated with the Perl interpreter. However, I’m pleased to say that Marlin’s constructors are now faster.

(Though also I forgot to include Mouse in previous benchmarks, so I’ve rectified that now.)

         Rate  Plain   Tiny    Moo  Moose   Core Marlin  Mouse
Plain  1357/s     --    -1%   -48%   -55%   -73%   -77%   -78%
Tiny   1374/s     1%     --   -48%   -54%   -72%   -77%   -78%
Moo    2617/s    93%    91%     --   -13%   -47%   -56%   -58%
Moose  3001/s   121%   118%    15%     --   -39%   -50%   -52%
Core   4943/s   264%   260%    89%    65%     --   -17%   -21%
Marlin 5976/s   340%   335%   128%    99%    21%     --    -4%
Mouse  6237/s   359%   354%   138%   108%    26%     4%     --

Does the Perl world need another object-oriented programming framework?

To be honest, probably not.

But here’s why you might want to give Marlin a try anyway.

• Most of your constructors and accessors will be implemented in XS and be really, really fast.

• If you accept a few basic principles like “attributes should usually be read-only”, it can be really, really concise to declare a class and its attributes.