Xaprb

I’ve been profiling a Perl program recently with Devel::FastProf, and I had a little bit of a hard time finding one of my hot spots. I had a construct like the following:

if ( $condition_one ) {
  # some code
}
elsif ( $other_condition ) {
  # code
}
elsif ( my (@temp) = $text =~ m/(complex) (regex)/g ) {
  # some other code
}
elsif {
  # and so on
}

Devel::FastProf showed me that my hot spot in the code was the very first line. I could not understand why. I tried a few different things — always the same result.

Then it hit me. The way I write the code and what the Perl compiler turns it into aren’t the same things at all. Ever tried to debug an if/elsif/elsif statement in Perl’s debugger? You get to step up to the first line, but then immediately afterwards you drop into the case that matched — you don’t get to step over each condition check in turn.

Perl treats them all as one statement. And my hot spot was really the third conditional check. I fixed it by replacing that with a simple regular expression and doing the complex parsing inside the block.