Re: what would you like to see in perl5.12?

[bennymack]

How about some way to inline subroutines at compile time. Sort of like other compile-time optimizations but with a little added smarts. "use constant" will currently inline a sub ref which is good and pretty fast. But it seems like it would be even faster to turn the inlined sub ref into a do block.

$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -MO=Deparse -e '
use constant FOO => sub { join( shift, @_, ); };
printf( "%s\n", FOO->( ", ", 1 .. 10, ), );
'
use constant ('FOO', sub {
    BEGIN {${^WARNING_BITS} = "UUUUUUUUUUUU"}
    use strict 'refs';
    join shift @_, @_;
}
);
BEGIN {${^WARNING_BITS} = "UUUUUUUUUUUU"}
use strict 'refs';
printf "%s\n", sub {
    join shift @_, @_;
}
->(', ', 1..10);
-e syntax OK

Wouldn't it be nice if that were turned into this instead?

perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -e '
printf "%s\n", do {
        local @_ = (", ", 1..10);
        join shift @_, @_;
};
'

Update: Added benchmark so people can debunk/prove the need for this.

Update: Looks like I had the benchmarks backward and that a sub ref is actually faster than a do block. So, nevermind...

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Benchmark();

Benchmark::cmpthese( -1, {
  sub_join_1  => sub { sub { join shift @_, @_; }->( ", ", 1 .. 100 );
+            },
  do_join_1 =>   sub { do  { local @_ = ( ", ", 1 .. 100 ); join shift
+ @_, @_; }; },
} );

__END__

$ perl bench_do_sub_1.pl
              Rate  do_join_1 sub_join_1
do_join_1  17935/s         --       -73%
sub_join_1 66991/s       274%         --