If you're worried about speed, I don't see any way that the argument passing mechanism could be your bottleneck -- if you want to trim clock cycles, start your search elsewhere. However, if you're sure argument passing is really slowing you down, then whatever sub you're calling probably shouldn't be in a sub. If it must be in a sub, consider either using lexical variables bound by a closure (no arguments "passed"), or passing references to the large objects.

Anyway, I will attempt to answer your question. You should look at the Benchmark module comes with your Perl distribution. I ran a few test cases, and found the shift method faster for very small arguments (ints, small strings, references), and the @_ method faster for passing larger objects (strings). Try it out yourself with whatever data is most common in your app.

blokhead

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

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.