Asynchronous HTTP requests in Perl 6

Inspired by http://oylenshpeegul.typepad.com/blog/2012/03/asynchronicity.html, I decided to tackle asynchronous  HTTP requests in Perl 6 on Rakudo. Allowing this required a bit of hacking on MuEvent, and the changes are far too ugly and hacky to be released, but here’s how it looks:

    use MuEvent;

    my @urls = <
        cpan.org
        kosciol-spaghetti.pl
        perlcabal.org
        duckduckgo.com
        perl6.org
    >;
    my $count = @urls.elems;
    my $starttime;

    sub handler ($what, $content) {
        say sprintf "%-25s has loaded in %s", $what, now - $starttime;
        unless --$count {
            say "Finished in {now - $starttime} seconds";
            exit 0;
        }
    }

    for @urls -> $url {
        http_get(url => $url, cb => sub { handler($url, $^content) })
    }

    $starttime = now;

    MuEvent::run;

The code results in something like this:

    cpan.org                  has loaded in 0.047303409195493
    perlcabal.org             has loaded in 0.0985883954326499
    duckduckgo.com            has loaded in 0.137316369015216
    perl6.org                 has loaded in 0.175586713955562
    kosciol-spaghetti.pl      has loaded in 0.413971411974607
    Finished in 0.465130828044337 seconds

You may notice that the urls are pretty much ordered – that’s because my internet connection is probably way faster than MuEvent’s event loop :)

For now http_get() is using bare sockets to send HTTP requests, which is, well, Less Than Awesome at least. Once I figure out how to properly tie LWP::Simple to MuEvent I’ll hopefully hack out some proper solution to be released for everyone’s joy. Stay tuned.

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