Hm you're right, I had not realized it'd be for *every* route. Indeed we
need more benchmark here :) But I like the attribute style. If it can help
in decision making, catalyst makes use of them as well, and it's rather
elegant.

Attribute style might be visually nice, but the implementation of

attributes in Perl is really ugly hackery and many people (myself

included) who have gotten into the weeds have concluded that it's just

not worth the trouble.

Personally, I would find the style below just as appealing if not more

because it's guaranteed to follow Perl's grammar:

get '/beer' => requires_role BeerDrinker => sub { ... };

get '/user/:user_id' => requires_role qw/Admin TeamLeader/ => sub { ... };

Plus, I can do this:

my @power_users = qw/Admin TeamLeader/;

get '/user/:user_id' => requires_role @power_users => sub { ... };

You can't as easily do that with attributes because attribute

parameters are strings that have to be parsed -- typically split on

whitespace. You *could* parse looking for "@\w+" and then eval() it,

but (a) that's gross and (b) you've got timing issues because the

attribute is processed at compile time and the array isn't populated

until runtime.

And consider if you want to put your role names in a config file

instead of the source code. How do you do that with attributes?