I'm sorry, this isn't a web application (where you have multiple servers, cores and apache instances). This is a single threaded application, some of the most critical code in the system has been profiled to run in microseconds.

Are we using the wrong language? It's funny you say that, it's been a topic around here recently. I talk to the C++ guys we work with and they tell me we'd be insane to try and move our business logic to C++, it is just too hard to manage long term. The only other options are Java, or C# (I hope to avoid going down that path). Perl meets and exceeds our expectations of what is possible of a scripting language, this post was an attempt to try and take "it" to the next level, based on what we thought MIGHT be the issues.

I humbly disagree with your assessment of our approach on compile time safety for attribute lookup, if you'd like to further discuss this, feel free to drop me a line (ryan-dot-dietrich-at-gmail-dot-com)