(Ovid) Re: Improving the efficiency of this piece of code

[Ovid]

One thing I'd like to hear comment about: I've read that CGI.pm has to jump through so many hoops to export its functions that the OO interface is actually as fast OR FASTER than the functional interface. If anyone has more info about that, I'd love to hear more.

Cheers,
Ovid

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[MeowChow]

I don't believe that the overhead is in exporting the functions, but in the ability for the methods to "swing both ways".

Every dual-nature (ie. functional and OO) method in CGI starts off by calling an internal sub, self_or_default, to determine the calling style. If the method was called as an export, self_or_default has to do the additional task of unshifting the default CGI object ($Q in the CGI.pm source) onto @_. This negates any performance gain from not having the method-call overhead:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Benchmark qw(cmpthese);

use CGI qw(:standard);
my $q = new CGI;

cmpthese (-3, {
  method => sub { $q->header; },
  direct => sub { header; }
});

### RESULTS ####

          Rate direct method
direct 14483/s     --    -4%
method 15106/s     4%     --

So it appears as if OO calling style on CGI is indeed faster in practice.

   MeowChow                                   
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