[sf-perl] making perl compile phase faster

Michael Friedman friedman at highwire.stanford.edu
Fri Apr 29 12:30:41 PDT 2011


I'm having a lucky day, so why not test it...

At my site, we run a lot of command-line perl scripts. Unfortunately, we also have 2794 perl modules. Some of our scripts load up thousands of lines of perl code before they can do anything, even display a usage statement. Generally, from the time you hit <return> it's at least 5 seconds before anything happens, often longer, because perl has to load in all the required modules. 

At one point, I looked into using SelfLoader and making every method into an autoloaded method, but that failed on some of our important modules because they were not coded to be as... we'll go with "clean"... as I would like. And since we have thousands of modules, any solution has to be automated across nearly everything to work. I can't get in the way of the rest of the development team's work, even for a noticeable performance gain.

So, let me ask y'all:
1. Is there anything approaching a "perl compiler" these days? (Something that does the compile stage early and lets you then just run the binary later.) 

2. Is there a better option than SelfLoader now, for only compiling the methods that you are actually using instead of all of them? (As you would guess, a 1,000+ line perl module has a lot of things in it that you don't need for any one script.)

3. Are there ways of marking up methods so they don't get parsed and compiled until they're needed?

Thanks for any advice, tips, or tricks!
-- Mike

PS - We aren't using Moose or anything like that. All the modules are hash-based, generic Perl objects and function libraries. If there's a class structure framework or something that could take care of this partial compilation for me, that'd work too. 
______________________________________________________________________________
Mike Friedman | HighWire Press, Stanford Univ | friedman at highwire.stanford.edu



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