Hm. That seems like a prime example of the whatifitis I've been decrying elsewhere :)

Without claiming any great expertise in XS, the idea that calling an XS subroutine to access a variable could ever be quicker than a direct hash element look up doesn't seem at all feasible, let alone likely.

I was thinking more along the lines of intrinsic support, using a mechanism like Perl 6. But furthermore it might be available on some platforms and not others, or use XS to backport some of the higher stuff to other versions so the same support _seems_ to be there but is not as snappy.

Maybe I'll load a Perl 5 Moose-based module into a Perl 6 program.