in reply to Re: Writing portable code
in thread Writing portable code

The disadvantage here is that the WinFunctions package is still parsed and compiled on Linux machines, and the symbol table still exists using up memory, even if it never gets used.

For a handful of small functions this is unlikely to cause many performance problems.

What you need to look out for though are cases where, say, WinFunctions not only will not run on Linux, but won't even compile on Linux (e.g. because it uses some Win32::* module). Careful use of run-time require should generally solve this.

package Cow { use Moo; has name => (is => 'lazy', default => sub { 'Mooington' }) } say Cow->new->name

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Re^3: Writing portable code
by DrHyde (Prior) on Mar 11, 2013 at 11:34 UTC

    Even thinking about having a few unused entries in the symbol table is a ridiculous micro-optimisation.

    If you want to keep the code clean and in one file, then I suggest something like this ... 

    use Devel::CheckOS;
setup_for_platform();

... application code goes here ...

# decide what platform-specific code to use
sub setup_for_platform {
  if(os_is('MicrosoftWindows')) {
    *do_stuff = \&do_stuff_for_windows;
  } elsif(os_is('Unix')) {
    *do_stuff = \&do_stuff_for_unix;
  } else {
    die("Don't know about $^O\n");
  }
}

# platform-specific function implementations
sub do_stuff_for_unix { ... }
sub do_stuff_for_windows { ... }

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