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Postings from July 2009
Various modules, mostly pragmas, need a way to hook themselfs in at the end of
compile time of a given scope, to do things like cleaning up after themselfs.
The core currently doesn't provide a way to do that.
Various ways of doing it anyway have been implemented nevertheless. They all
rely on a lexicalized hints hash (and therefore $^H, a variable strictly for
internal use only) and the fact that a localized hints hash is being destroyed
right after compiling a block has finished, i.e. during scope_leave.
That's bad. Even worse, the trivial implementation of end-of-scope hooks, which
relies on a Scope::Guard (or a similar object, giving a callback during
DESTROY), doesn't always work on 5.10, where %^H is propagated into string
evals, which increments the refcount of the stored objects, preventing their
DESTROY methods from firing when you'd expect them to.
B::Hooks::EndOfScope avoids this by relying on attaching free magic to %^H, but
that's not a very elegant solution either.
The following patch implements a new special variable,
@{^COMPILE_SCOPE_CONTAINER}, which allows implementing the behaviour required
by the current users of the %^H + Scope::Guard and B::Hooks::EndOfScope users.
After showing an early version of this patch to #p5p, the feedback I got was
mostly good, but people were wondering if COMPILE_SCOPE_CONTAINER should
propagate into string evals, because it might be possible to make it behave
differently when a string eval is involved. I tried to come up with a test that
demonstrates that, but I failed. I don't think it's possible, but I'd be glad
to be proven wrong. I also don't think that propagating into string evals is
the behaviour we want. I also can't think of a useful feature that said
propagating would allow us to implement.
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