How about IPC (inter-process communications) using STDIN and STDOUT?

Create a long-running perl script that starts up, loads your massive library, then waits for input on STDIN. Devise a simple "protocol" to communicate to the perl API from VBA, then outputs the results to STDOUT. All this in a while(1) loop.

From VBA, when the spreadsheet opens, start up the perl process and get handles on its input and output. Then feed it function calls and read the results.

I have no idea how easy/possible it is to do that in VBA, but it's not unreasonable. You'll also need to be aware of deadlocking issues, etc.

This approach would give you the benefits of a long-running, compile-once perl instance, without the learning curve of apache+modperl.

In reply to Re: Absolute simplest way to keep a database variable persistent? by clwolfe
in thread Absolute simplest way to keep a database variable persistent? by natestraight

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