Closer to Magic

This past week was a light week development wise. Mostly, I am blocking waiting for my dependencies for Voltron to catch up and merge in my branches. One of the blockers was method trait arguments in MooseX::Method::Signatures. I am not really a firm believer in passing arguments to these things since it is compile time (in terms of MXMS/MXD), so you are stuck with static data. But it was deemed important enough to require implementation. So I worked with Cory Watson to figure where his implementation was falling short.

Initially, the first attempt at traits is what I merged into my local repo and made it work. It was kind of a naive approach where the stuff directly returned from the Devel::Declare context was just rolled up and applied. And the arguments were discarded. It works. The problem with the arguments is that you get them as a string back from the context. And how do you turn a string into a data structure suitable for constructor consumption?

You could eval, or you could parse. I chose parse. So I spent the weeknd and part of the week implementing a PPI based module for parsing Moose-style constructor arguments (eg. Foo->new(attribute1 => ['foo'], ...) ). And I am happy to report that Parse::Constructor::Arguments parses arbitrarily nested static declarations for arguments and returns a hash ref suitable for %{ $hashref } in a constructor.

In the mean time, Cory had taken another stab at doing traits+args. And this work really had promise, but he was stuck. And an hour of delving into it, I realized a couple of things. First, he was overwriting the caller package initialized $meta which means that the method, once properly instantiated, was not applied appropriately. And secondly, his arguments weren't being applied at all, not sure what to do with what his shadowed method was getting.

The first was easy enough to fix, just add in another lexical. The second was a case of applying my previous PPI work and also Hash::Merge to roll up all of the arguments from all of the traits so they can be all be supplied to the new_object method once.

And after a little clean up and commit amending, all tests were passing and based on the lastest Florian master.

Now I just need to hound Florian until he either merges in the branch or implements his own solution for trait arguments.