http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1004366


in reply to Re: xs modifying passed value
in thread xs modifying passed value

Considered having the return of MyLib::strToInt be the bool, and the param be the int? Usually subs/funcs return true false, and details of the operation are inplace updates/ pass by reference/ $_[0] = "hello";/*status = 1;/. Or the author of C++ method strToInt did it that way and thats the way you will remember it in Perl? You could also return 2 elements "($truefalse, $theint) = $instance->strToInt();", and have MyLib::strToInt method take only one param (THIS scalar). If the caller in perl doesn't want the int, they dont need to collect it in list context.

edit: With XS/C/Perl internals, the biggest XSUB debugging tool is looking at the .c code. Try posting that. For C code, you should learn how to create post C processor code, then run it through a code formatter. A 7 character named macro taking 1 param, barely or terribly documented, can expand to a screenful of code after 2-5 layers of macros are expanded. To understand why it failed, looking at the post preprocessor output it the only way. Also compile with optimize=debug and symbols, as you said already, you have a C debugger, so thats correct. Also instead of returning 1 bool, or a list, consider returning a hashref, a hashref is probably overkill for this function.