Dear Monks,

in an ultra-lightweight webserver I have this code:

sub loadCode {
  my $this   = shift;
  my $scrref = &getFileAsString($this->{filename}); # load into the re
+gistry

  $this->{code} = sub {eval($$scrref);};       # store the script in a
+n anonymous subroutine
}
[download]

The code is then executed as &{$this->{code}};. This works - to a certain extent - well. As already stated in the camel book, the eval EXPR is much slower than the eval BLOCK syntax. And if I do cut&paste code and do a BLOCK after eval (resulting in sub {eval { <verbatim perl-code here...> }; }, execution gets about 18times faster.

My problem is simple: I'm greedy ;-) - that is - I would like to benefit from the speedup, but also be able to initialize these anonymous subroutines at startup of the script (they do not need to be changed at runtime).

I thought about constructing perl source code by another script, but before I'd do such a kludgy solution, I wanted to ask you if there is not a better solution. All in all: mod_perl must do something similar - no?

Thank you for your suggestions.