Hello dear Perl Monks,

I'm asking for help because I have a very delicate problem which involves objects and method calls. More specifically, it involves calling methods which have punctuation marks in their names, such as "+", "-", etc...

So far, I tried 5 different ways for making a method call, but all turned out to be much slower than specifying directly the method name (using Perl-5.22.0).

use Benchmark qw(cmpthese);

package Example {
    sub new    { bless {}, __PACKAGE__ }
    sub method { }
}

my $obj  = Example->new;
my $meth = 'method';

cmpthese(-1,
         {
          direct => sub { $obj->method },
          var    => sub { $obj->$meth },
          ref    => sub { $obj->${\'method'} },
          can    => sub { $obj->can('method')->($obj) },
          magic  => sub { ${ref($obj) . '::'}{'method'}->($obj) },
         }
);

[download]

(I used "method" for the method name just for illustration, but consider that "method" can have any possible name)

Output:

            Rate  magic    can    ref    var direct
magic  3495252/s     --    -0%   -37%   -41%   -58%
can    3510857/s     0%     --   -36%   -40%   -58%
ref    5518821/s    58%    57%     --    -6%   -34%
var    5887725/s    68%    68%     7%     --   -29%
direct 8340945/s   139%   138%    51%    42%     --

[download]

(If you are wondering where do I need this; well, it's part of a toy-compiler which generates Perl code from a much higher language, in which any operation is translated into a method call)

My question now is, how can I make the Perl interpreter to optimize non-alphanumeric method calls, in the same way as it optimizes direct alphanumeric ones?

Thank you.

In reply to Optimizing non-alphanumeric method calls by trizen

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