Hi all, Test::Class can speed up your your tests by ensuring that perl and related modules are loaded only once. I was thinking about how this could be done with normal .t files and a colleague mentioned some stuff that Apache::Registry does and I thought it would be interesting to see if I could incorporate its methodology.
I've posted the outline of the idea and the code at http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=652605. It would take some work to get this production ready, but basically it does the following: test = '' foreach .t file: code = slurp(file) create a unique package name test .= <<"END_CODE"; package $package sub handler { $code } END_CODE end foerach eval test BAILOUT($@) if $@; foreach package in packages package->handler end Just as with mod_perl, there are caveats on how you can write your tests: * no __DATA__ or __END__ blocks. * Don't rely on implicit behavior of cleanup in END blocks. * I've had 'use Config' and IPC:: code fail, but I don't know why. Right now it's just a toy, but my initial work shows that I can gain a speedup on test suites if they can be run with this. A conceptually similar idea reduced test time to 1/3rd of its original time. Cheers, Ovid -- Buy the book - http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlhks/ Perl and CGI - http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/cgi_course/ Personal blog - http://publius-ovidius.livejournal.com/ Tech blog - http://use.perl.org/~Ovid/journal/
