Benchmarking is hard
Benchmarking is hard to do right. Recently Jason Switzer found an old benchmark of the smart match operator written by Michael Schwern. Jason Switcher comments: If I were to publish a paper with such a...
View ArticleWhen perfection isn’t good enough
One of the many possible problems with using CPAN modules is that they often just implement the parts of the problems the author needed a solution for. But once in a while you run into the opposite...
View ArticleMore fun with DESTROY
When I wrote about exception handling in Perl I mentioned briefly that DESTROY() methods should localize $? too. Try this script: #!/usr/bin/perl package Foo; sub new { my $class = shift; open my $fh,...
View ArticleBenchmarking serialization modules
First you have to optimize for correctness, then you can optimize for speed. At the moment I’m working on a project where I do a lot of serialization, and to ensure that I could debug the correctness I...
View ArticleNew version of the Padre debugger plugin
I’ve just uploaded a new version of Padre-Plugin-Debugger to CPAN. It has been stuck in github for a while as I meant to write some documentation and start calling it version 1.0. But as I haven’t...
View ArticleThe evil of a global $_
I often write code like this: $_->store() for @objects; and quite often it actually works. But suddenly a piece of code doing this in a loop broke with this error message: Can’t call method “store”...
View ArticleWhy write an editor in Perl?
I’m a happy vim-user and I don’t see that change any time soon. But recently I have been hacking around with Padre, an editor writen in Perl and for Perl programmers. And even though I like my non-GUI...
View ArticleShell hacks: bash functions in files
Over the years I have collected a few shell snippets that have to be sourced or called as shell functions to work correctly. Having all these function definitions in a monolithic file sourced from my...
View ArticleRegular Expressions: Beyond the fundamentals
At this years YAPC::EU I’m giving a talk about some of the more advanced features of regular expressions. Slides are available at http://hacking.dk/talks/yapceu2009/ – There is a pretty regexp...
View ArticlePrivate methods in Perl5
It is common knowledge that you can’t have private functions and methods in Perl5. But it turns out that you can do it, one way is to use namespace::clean. Using this module you can either declare all...
View ArticleHTTP::Engine is great
For simple web-based services I usually just use Perl and CGI.pm. After having read a bit about HTTP::Engine I tried it for a simple project yesterday. Beside my own logic it only took a few line of...
View ArticleOptimizing ORLite.pm
While profiling some code making heavy use of Adam Kennedy’s ORLite module for accessing a SQLite database I found that most of my time was spend in DBI.pm. Sorted by inclusive time (ie. including time...
View ArticleBenchmarking some ORLite variants
It would be nice if I could get my ORLite performance boost without really changing the (undocumented) API. So I got one more idea: Do the slicing in the ORLite generated code. It’s available in a new...
View ArticleNew Module: Benchmark::Serialize
Tim Bunce mentioned my blogpost about Benchmarking serialization modules in a post on the perl5-porters mailing list. He wished that someone would make that benchmark into a distribution on CPAN. How...
View ArticleReading Twitter with generic RSS reader
For a long time I have mainly been reading Twitter with a generic RSS reader (newsbeuter). Recently this stopped working when twitter.com disabled ‘HTTP Basic Auth’ in preference of using OAuth. Now I...
View ArticleWrapping mod_perl in Plack
Plack is one of these wonderful adventures in the modern Perl world that makes it fun to write Web applications in Perl again. But I have a few applications written with Apache/mod_perl and they are...
View ArticleSplicing two sockets in Perl (request for help)
A couple of times I have written code which basically does this: accept() an incoming connection do some magic to get another socket start passing bit between the two sockets perform a correct close...
View ArticleCreating a negative match RegExp object
It is a frequently asked Perl question how to write a regular expression that matches anything but “something”. The usual answer is that it can’t be done or that you need to use the !~ operator instead...
View ArticleDeploying “Half of CPAN” on Debian using Carton
As systems developer I like just being able to pick the most useful Perl modules from CPAN and preferably use quite recent versions of the modules I need. On the other hand our systems administrators...
View ArticleReviewing my own regular expressions
Regular expressions are a wonderful tool, but as many other powerful tools they tend to be misused. If I had a penny for everytime I recommended against using regular expressions for parsing HTML...
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