Class::XSAccessor implements fast XS accessors both for getting at and setting an object attribute. Additionally, the module supports mutators and simple predicates like those for testing the truth value of a variable. It works only with objects that are implemented as ordinary hashes. . The XS accessor methods were between 1.6 and 2.5 times faster than typical pure-perl accessors in some simple benchmarking. If you usually write clear code, a factor of two speed-up is a good estimate. . Refer to Class::XSAccessor::Array (also included in libclass-xsaccessor-perl) for an implementation that works with array-based objects.