Re: Moose speed and schedule

Jonathan,

> Unfortunately, the current object construction slowness will make  
> this a non-starter. e.g. On my powerbook it takes 25ms of CPU time  
> for Moose to construct a dead-simple object with a single accessor  
> and no inheritance.

Yes, this is a well known issue, and one I am currently working on  
solving it.

A question though, is this benchmark including Class::MOP/Moose  
compile time? Because that is something we cannot do too much about  
at the moment, which means Moose is really only usable in persistent  
environments like mod_perl/FastCGI/etc.

> http://code2.0beta.co.uk/moose/svn/Moose/trunk/lib/Moose/Cookbook/ 
> FAQ.pod mentions that immutable classes may eliminate, or at least  
> vastly improve, object construction performance, and implies this  
> will hopefully be done by the end of the year. Does this schedule  
> still sound reasonable?

There is currently an experimental branch of the immutable Moose

http://code2.0beta.co.uk/moose/svn/Moose/branches/Moose-immutable/

it requires this branch from Class-MOP as well

http://code2.0beta.co.uk/moose/svn/Class-MOP/branches/Class-MOP- 
tranformations/

It is not yet finished, but the plan is to get it completely working  
by the end of this month. Production worthiness will take a little  
longer of course, probably close to that "end of the year" timeline.

Early benchmarks show an average performance boost of 400-500%, with  
a upper ceiling of 1200% for really simple constructors and a bottom  
of about 175% for very complex constructors. A lot of this is  
dependent upon the complexity of your attributes, and I do my best to  
make sure you only pay for what you actually use.

This branch also includes a speed up version of the type constraint  
system as well, which shows a performance boost of around 400% from  
previous versions. This also contributes to the speedup in object  
construction as well.

> In the meantime, does anyone have a recommendation for an alternate  
> class framework I can use that will make the eventual jump to Moose  
> as painless as possible?

Well, it all depends on what Moose features you use. A fair portion  
of them are not available anywhere else on CPAN. One alternative,  
which I use myself, is to downgrade to Moose 0.11 (and Class::MOP  
0.30 or so). It is still a little slow, but much more manageable,  
especially if you are still in the development phase where speed  
really shouldn't be that important.

- Stevan