[BNE-PM] The Perl one-liner

[Derek Thomson]

David Bussenschutt wrote:
> Speaking of filehandle identifiers, typeglobs and kludges.....
> 
> just the day before yesterday, I was funbling with this very same 
> "typeglob" issue, and how to pass this around into functions etc. EXCEPT, 
> mine wasn't a filehandle, so I couldn't use IO:File ... it was a Socket.  
> I didn't want to 'use IO:Socket' because it's got quite large overheads in 
> comparison to just 'use Socket'. 

They may be large, but are they really significant? I use IO::Socket 
throughout my Perl CORBA ORB, without a problem that I've noticed.

Remember, your average Java program running on a hotspot JVM (which is 
necessary to get anything approaching acceptable performance) is going 
to consume 40-50M by the time it "warms up", and gathers all that data 
and precompiles all that "hotspot" code. Compared to *that* even 1M or 
so on a 256M machine just isn't worth worrying about. The total size is 
still around 5M, so I still win by about 40M on average!

Also, I have IO::Socket set up as a dynamic library, so you only pay the 
price of that 1M *once* across all running Perl programs, so suddenly 
the effective overhead of IO::Socket can be divided by the count of all 
running Perl servers and clients.

> Of course, the other problem was that I was creating the socket inside a 
> ->new() object creation routine, and had to then save this newly created 
> socket/filehandle into the anonymous hash that the object uses for it's 
> object data. 
> I eventually figured out the following...
> ....
> below this is an extract showing the creation of the object/socket.  The 
> really important line is the use of Symbol::gensym() 

Didn't know that one. Very nice! But still, I'd only do it if there was 
a good reason to keep the size minimal, premature optimization being the 
root of all evil ...

--
D.