NAME
    Faster - do some things faster

SYNOPSIS
     use Faster;

     perl -MFaster ...

DESCRIPTION
    This module implements a very simple-minded JIT. It works by more or
    less translating every function it sees into a C program, compiling it
    and then replacing the function by the compiled code.

    As a result, startup times are immense, as every function might lead to
    a full-blown compilation.

    The speed improvements are also not great, you can expect 20% or so on
    average, for code that runs very often.

    Faster is in the early stages of development. Due to its design its
    relatively safe to use (it will either work or simply slowdown the
    program immensely, but rarely cause bugs).

    Usage is very easy, just "use Faster" and every function called from
    then on will be compiled.

    Right now, Faster will leave ltos of *.c, *.o and *.so files in /tmp,
    and it will even create those temporary files in an insecure manner, so
    watch out.

BUGS/LIMITATIONS
    Perl will check much less often for asynchronous signals in
    Faster-compiled code. It tries to check on every function call, loop
    iteration and every I/O operator, though.

    The following things will disable Faster. If you manage to enable them
    at runtime, bad things will happen.

     enabled tainting
     enabled debugging

    This will dramatically reduce Faster's performance:

     threads (but you don't care about speed if you use threads anyway)

    These constructs will force the use of the interpreter as soon as they
    are being executed, for the rest of the currently executed:

     .., ... (flipflop operators)
     goto
     next, redo (but not well-behaved last's)
     eval
     require
     any use of formats

AUTHOR
     Marc Lehmann <schmorp@schmorp.de>
     http://home.schmorp.de/