eight crazy nights of Perl code from RJBS Feed

Infinite Diversity in Infinite MooseX

MooseX::SetOnce - 2011-12-27

Mutability, Laziness, and Requiredness

Moose attributes can be mutable ("rw") or immutable ("ro"). (This is a simplification, but basically true.) If an object has a mutable attribute, its value can be changed over and over again during the lifetime of the object. If it's immutable, it can never be changed. It will get a value during initialization and that value will never change. (I am a big fan of immutability, and have written about how mutability can bite you in the past.)

Moose attributes can be required or not. If they're required, then either they must have a value supplied to the constructor or there must be a default for the attribute. (You can mark an attribute both required and give it a default, but with a default, the "required" is redundant.)

Moose attributes can be lazy or not. If they're lazy, and no value was provided in the constructor, then the default won't be sorted out until the attribute's reader is called – in other words, if at all possible, the default won't be sorted out.

These are all useful knobs to be able to twist, but they can't quite all be twisted at the same time. Or, maybe more accurately, there are some combinations of these behaviors that you can't get out of the box.

For example, you might want a way to say that an attribute is both required and lazy. That is, you want a lack of any provided value to be fatal, but only when someone tries to read the attribute that's lacking its required value. You can't really get this with stock Moose attributes, because lazy means that you must provide a default, and if you have a default, required is redundant. When Moose is missing this kind of feature, it's often added in a MooseX module, and that's just what happened here. MooseX::LazyRequire provides a trait that lets you mark attributes as having a "lazy requiredness." (Okay, so this isn't quite lazy and required, but you get the gist, right?)

A Can of WORMs

I had been using MooseX::LazyRequire for quite a while when I realized that there was another set of knob positions that I wanted but couldn't tune in myself: I wanted attributes that were not required or lazy, but immutable. That is, I wanted to be able to set the value myself, once, but never change it.

In other words, I didn't want a "ro" or "rw" attribute, but a "worm" attribute. So, I wrote MooseX::WORM, and immediately everyone under the age of 30 said "What the heck is WORM?" and I finally succumbed and renamed it to MooseX::SetOnce.

It works like this:


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{
  package Person;
  use Moose;
  use MooseX::SetOnce;

  has first_kiss => (
    is => 'rw',
    isa => 'Person',
    traits => [ 'SetOnce' ],
    predicate => 'ever_been_kissed',
  );
}

my $alice = Person->new;
my $bob = Person->new;

if ($alice->ever_been_kissed) {
# never reached
}

$alice->first_kiss($bob);

if ($alice->ever_been_kissed) {
# reached!
}
 

The use cases are relatively few and far between, but when you need it, you need it, and it's easy to use.

...and thanks, Dist::Zilla Moose hackers!

My initial implementation of MooseX::SetOnce was pretty simple, and worked. As Moose changed, though, it broke, and it looked like learning to fix it was going to be more work than I was excited to do. Fortunately for me, I had used it in Dist::Zilla, and a few of the core Moose team were using Dist::Zilla and, to keep it working, have supplied me with numerous patches to keep it working just right over time. Frankly, I'm not sure how much of the code left in there is mine anymore. git blame suggests about 70%, but I'm guessing most of that is Pod, blank lines, and bugs.

Thanks, everybody!

See Also