in reply to More efficient return of values from sub

Has there been a problem with some resource(s) that causes you to look at this subroutine? If there hasn't, then why are you worrying? Just return an hashref and let the caller worry about it. Or, return an singleton object with a nice interface and let the object lazy-load what it gets asked for. (This is a really good use of the Singleton pattern, in case you're wondering.)

Now, if you're having performance problems, have you profiled your app to find where the problems are? I would be very surprised if it was the returning semantics that was causing you performance problems.

So, just bundle it up into a Singleton, clean up your callers, and go home. :-)

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