Looking into the program

By Elena Bolshakova (‎helena‎) from Moscow.pm
Date: Saturday, 24 November 2012 12:20
Duration: 20 minutes
Target audience: Intermediate
Language: English
Tags: cpan debugging perl5

There are several hundreds of modules in Devel:: namespace on CPAN,
and at least several dozens of them are intended for dynanmic tracing of execution of Perl programs.
With all their helpfulness one has to admit there is still no ultimate solution,
no "best choice" to meet various user's needs.

So, when a couple of years ago we at Yandex.Direct realized that we did need a really flexible,
not to say, universal tool we searched among existing ones first and then we created and
implemented our own module for tracing Perl code execution.
The module has proved to serve our needs really well and we think is could be worth sharing with Perl community.

Meanwhile, with my growing interest in this area, I have been performing an exhaustive overview
of existing CPAN modules for tracing programs, so I'm going to give a brief summary on them,
to offer possible classification, and to choose a set of tools,
both necessary and sufficient in terms of inspecting Perl programs.

I hope my talk will be interesting for both beginners and intermediate Perl developers.