The fastest way to pass arguments is not to copy them at all, and to access them inplace in @_. (This of course doesn't make readable code). The test case below illustrates this poorly for a simplified function.

Update: BrowserUk's answer demonstrates this better.

use Benchmark qw/cmpthese/;
 
sub s1 {my ($arg1, $arg2, $arg3) = @_; $arg+$arg2+$arg3 };
sub s2 { my $arg1 = shift; my $arg2 = shift; my $arg3 = shift; $arg1+$
+arg2+$arg3}
sub s3 {$_[0] + $_[1] + $_[2] }
 
cmpthese(200000, {
    shift  => ' { s2(1,2,3) }',
    list  => ' {s1(1,2,3)}',
    none  => ' {s3(1,2,3)}',
  })

Benchmark: timing 200000 iterations of list, none, shift...
      list:  4 wallclock secs ( 1.39 usr +  0.00 sys =  1.39 CPU) @ 14
+3884.89/s (n=200000)
      none:  1 wallclock secs ( 0.70 usr +  0.01 sys =  0.71 CPU) @ 28
+1690.14/s (n=200000)
     shift:  2 wallclock secs ( 1.46 usr +  0.03 sys =  1.49 CPU) @ 13
+4228.19/s (n=200000)
          Rate shift  list  none
shift 134228/s    --   -7%  -52%
list  143885/s    7%    --  -49%
none  281690/s  110%   96%    --

[download]

--
integral, resident of freenode's #perl

In reply to Re: Re: Silly question about function args by integral
in thread Silly question about function args by Anonymous Monk

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