Comments on: AutoLoader Considered Harmful?

By: zgrim

zgrim — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 08:40:03 +0000

AutoSplit is evil :) just recently I encountered a weird bug where I was running some forked code and if it needed to chroot, Storable wouldn’t find it’s needed .al files for freeze/thaw, which was solved via a dummy load of freeze/thaw before the fork(). Very unpleasant debugging session though :)

By: Leon Timmermans

Leon Timmermans — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 13:23:23 +0000

90% of the time AutoLoader is a premature optimization, and in the rare case it isn’t that probably points out a badly structured module. It’s a source of subtle bugs that should be avoided.

By: Aristotle Pagaltzis

Aristotle Pagaltzis — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 12:27:09 +0000

I advise to get rid of any uses. The POD should be updated to advise against its use too.

I believe it was not long ago that the last use of AutoLoader in another core module was removed, although I don’t recall the details. There are still some uses in dual-life modules.

By: Gabor Szabo

Gabor Szabo — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 11:43:23 +0000

I have other issues with the AutoSplit though it might just show my lack of knowledge. When you are running the already split up code and you encounter a bug it is quite hard to debug and fix the code as that requires mapping it back to the source.

And I already worked at companies that lost the original file.

So I don’t recommend any of my clients to use that and when I encounter a piece of code I’ll try to get rid of it while refactoring.

That does not mean that dynamic loading is bad. I just would keep modules intact. So if you’d like to load some code conditionally, go ahead do it. But put it in its own module. By design. That works well. Splitting up code is IMHO not.

BTW I love both Devel::Cover and Perl::Critic