How has support for AUTOLOAD and DESTROY changed across recent Perl versions?

Support for AUTOLOAD and DESTROY in Perl has evolved over the years, enhancing flexibility and control in object-oriented programming. Both features allow developers to handle method calls and destruction of objects in a more efficient manner, especially when dealing with dynamic methods and resource management.

The AUTOLOAD mechanism allows developers to catch calls to undefined methods, providing a way to implement dynamic method resolution. In recent versions of Perl, the use of AUTOLOAD has become more robust, allowing for better error handling and integration with other features.

DESTROY handles object destruction to free up resources when an object goes out of scope. The garbage collection process in Perl has seen improvements, making DESTROY calls more predictable and efficient, thereby improving memory management in larger applications.

Here's an example demonstrating both AUTOLOAD and DESTROY:


        package MyPackage;

        use strict;
        use warnings;

        sub AUTOLOAD {
            my $self = shift;
            our $AUTOLOAD;

            # Custom dynamic method handling
            print "Calling method: $AUTOLOAD\n";
        }

        sub DESTROY {
            my $self = shift;
            # Cleanup code here
            print "Object is being destroyed\n";
        }

        package main;

        my $obj = MyPackage->new();
        $obj->some_dynamic_method();  # This will call AUTOLOAD
        undef $obj;                   # This triggers DESTROY

How has support for AUTOLOAD and DESTROY changed across recent Perl versions?

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How has support for AUTOLOAD and DESTROY changed across recent Perl versions?

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