I have wanted to dump closures for a while, but it always appeared to be impossible. For example I looked at the Caveats Dumping Closures from Data-Dump-Streamer, and it scared me off.

But, today I played around with B-Deparse and PadWalker and came up with a dump_closure function that serializes a closure into a reasonable stringified version of the closure. It can even be eval'd to recreate the closure. So, I'm wondering what traps I'm not seeing?

Here is the code along with some test cases.

use warnings;
use strict;

use B::Deparse;
use PadWalker qw( closed_over );

sub dump_closure {
  my $f = shift;           # the closure
  my $conf = shift || ();  # hashref of options
  my $indent = exists $conf->{indent} ? $conf->{indent} :  '    ';
  my @deparse_opts =
    exists $conf->{deparse_opts} ? @{$conf->{deparse_opts}} : ('-sC');

  my ( $lexical_vars ) = closed_over( $f );
  my @lexical_vars = map {
    $indent . 'my '. $_. ' = '. ${$lexical_vars->{$_}}. ';'
  } sort keys %$lexical_vars;

  my $bd = B::Deparse->new( @deparse_opts );
  $bd->ambient_pragmas( strict => 'all', warnings => 'all' );
  my @body = split /\n/, $bd->coderef2text( $f );
  $body[0] = 'return sub ' . $body[0];
  @body = map { $indent . $_ } @body;

  return join "\n", 'sub {', @lexical_vars, @body, '} -> ()';
}

######################################################################
+########

# 2 * 3 * 4 = 24 = mult_n_n_n(2)->(3)->(4)
sub mult_n_n_n { # nested closure
  my $a = shift;
  return sub {
    my $b = shift;
    return sub {
      my $c = shift;
      return $a * $b * $c;
    }
  }
}

my $mult_2_n_n = mult_n_n_n( 2 );
my $mult_2_3_n = $mult_2_n_n->( 3 );

print dump_closure( $mult_2_n_n ), ";\n";
print dump_closure( $mult_2_3_n ), ";\n";

my $copy_2_3_n = eval( dump_closure( $mult_2_3_n ) );
print $@ if $@;
print $copy_2_3_n->( 4 ), "\n"; # clone works

my $copy_2_n_n = eval(  dump_closure( $mult_2_n_n ) );
print $@ if $@;
print $copy_2_n_n->( 3 )->( 4 ), "\n"; #clone works
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This produces:

sub {
    my $a = 2;
    return sub {
        my $b = shift @_;
        return sub {
            my $c = shift @_;
            return $a * $b * $c;
        }
        ;
    }
} -> ();
sub {
    my $a = 2;
    my $b = 3;
    return sub {
        my $c = shift @_;
        return $a * $b * $c;
    }
} -> ();
24
24

How do I get this functionality in Data-Dump or Data-Dump-Streamer or the debugger?