Question

I want to know what exactly is the sequence of calls that occurs when a getter/setter created through Class::MethodMaker is called?

How much costlier are getter/setters defined by MethodMaker than the native ones (overwritten in the module)?

Answer 1

I don’t have a simple answer for your question regarding Class::MethodMaker performance. As a previous answer mentioned, you can use the debugger to find out what’s going on under the hood. However, I know that Class::MethodMaker generates huge amounts of code at install time. This would indicate three separate things to me:

1. Regarding run-time, it’s probably on the faster side of the whole slew of method generators. Why generate loads of code at install time otherwise?
2. It installs O(Megabytes) of code on your disk!
3. It may potentially be slow at compile time, depending on what parts of the generated code are loaded for simple use cases.

You really need to spend a few minutes to think about what you really need. If you want simple accessor methods auto-generated but write anything more complicated by hand, maybe look at Class::Accessor::Fast. Or, if you want the fastest possible accessor-methods, investigate Class::XSAccessor, whose extra-simple methods run as C/XS code and are approximately twice as fast as the fastest Perl accessor. (Note: I wrote the latter module, so take this with a grain of salt.)

One further comment: if you’re ever going to use the PAR/PAR::Packer toolkit for packaging your application, note that the large amount of code of Class::MethodMaker results in a significantly larger executable and a slower initial start-up time. Additionally, there’s a known incompatibility between C::MethodMaker and PAR. But that may be considered a PAR bug.