metaclass(3)

💖 metaclass 💖

okay bestie, gather round — this is the page for metaclass(3), and it lives in the User Contributed Perl Documentation section of your man pages. Yes we're reading a manpage for fun now. That's just who we are. 💅

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✨ NAME ✨

metaclass — it's a pragma for installing and using Class::MOP metaclasses 🎀

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🌸 VERSION 🌸

version 2.4000 (yes, that's the real number, no I'm not being cute)

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

package MyClass;

# use Class::MOP::Class
use metaclass;

# ... or use a custom metaclass
use metaclass 'MyMetaClass';

# ... or use a custom metaclass
# and custom attribute and method
# metaclasses
use metaclass 'MyMetaClass' => (
    'attribute_metaclass' => 'MyAttributeMetaClass',
    'method_metaclass'    => 'MyMethodMetaClass',
);

# ... or just specify custom attribute
# and method classes, and Class::MOP::Class
# is the assumed metaclass
use metaclass (
    'attribute_metaclass' => 'MyAttributeMetaClass',
    'method_metaclass'    => 'MyMethodMetaClass',
);

# if we'd rather not install a 'meta' method, we can do this
use metaclass meta_name => undef;
# or if we'd like it to have a different name,
use metaclass meta_name => 'my_meta';

look at all those options, she's versatile, she contains multitudes 😭✨

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💜 DESCRIPTION 💜

So basically? This is a pragma whose whole job is making it easy to use one specific metaclass plus a whole little squad of custom attribute and method metaclasses. 🫶

And it also installs a "meta" method onto your class. Free of charge. Iconic behaviour honestly.

UNLESS — and this is the plot twist — you pass undef to the meta_name option. Then no meta method for you. 🙈

⚠️ real talk bestie: if you're using Moose, you most likely do NOT want to be using this. Go look into Moose::Util::MetaRole instead. That's the one for you. 💀

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

the literal legends who made this happen:

• Stevan Little <stevan@cpan.org>
• Dave Rolsky <autarch@urth.org>
• Jesse Luehrs <doy@cpan.org>
• Shawn M Moore <sartak@cpan.org>
• יובל קוג'מן (Yuval Kogman) <nothingmuch@woobling.org>
• Karen Etheridge <ether@cpan.org>
• Florian Ragwitz <rafl@debian.org>
• Hans Dieter Pearcey <hdp@cpan.org>
• Chris Prather <chris@prather.org>
• Matt S Trout <mstrout@cpan.org>

every single one of them, we stan 🌈

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🎀 COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE 🎀

This software is copyright (c) 2006 by Infinity Interactive, Inc.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself. 🍓

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and that's the whole page, bestie — you ate that. mwah 💋

this has been metaclass(3) from perl v5.42.0, dated 2025-07-25 — catch you in the next manpage, love you, bye 🦋✨