I decided to benchmark this and see what the difference was. Here is the script...
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Benchmark qw(:all);
use Params::Validate qw(:all);
sub ParamsValidateAssert {
my ($test) = validate_pos( @_,
{
type => SCALAR,
callbacks => { 'must be less than 50' => s
+ub { $_[0] < 50 }},
}
);
return $test;
}
sub OrAssert {
my ($test) = @_;
($test < 50) || die "Test is wrong";
return $test;
}
my @nums = map { ((rand() * 100) % 50) } (0 .. 100);
cmpthese(10_000, {
'ParamsValidateAssert' => sub { eval { ParamsValidateAssert($_) }
+for (@nums) },
'OrAssert' => sub { eval { OrAssert($_) }
+for (@nums) },
});
Here are the results...
Benchmark: timing 10000 iterations of OrAssert, ParamsValidateAssert..
+.
OrAssert: 8 wallclock secs ( 7.02 usr + 0.01 sys = 7.03 CPU) @ 14
+22.48/s (n=10000)
ParamsValidateAssert: 97 wallclock secs (87.88 usr + 0.38 sys = 88.26
+ CPU) @ 113.30/s (n=10000)
Rate ParamsValidateAssert OrAssert
ParamsValidateAssert 113/s -- -92%
OrAssert 1422/s 1155% --
It is almost 100% faster to use OR. Again, as I said, I think my style is less verbose and more readable so I favor it becuase of that as well.
But as water points out below, it should not completely be about the speed. I am sure that Params::Validate has a number of wheels I would not want want to have to re-invent when I hand-code OR based assertions. Looking over the docs for Params::Validate, I see where this could really be a useful tool for data validation, not just of subroutine parameters, but of web queries and such. As you say it can be quite declarative and I can see how you could build some very sophisticated data validation with it. However, I do think it is overkill for subroutine params and post/pre-condition checking.