[Chicago-talk] Speaking of threading

[Steven Lembark]

> lots of modules" (threaded and non- perls are binary incompatible, so
> any XS modules have to be reinstalled under the new perl).
>
> Any sense for what, say, various Linux distros ship with?

Noone ships with much of anything threaded by default, aside
from perhaps POSIX & linux threads in libc. Threads are pretty
much a non-issue for anyone that doesn't really knead them.
Part of that is due to the fairly painful nature of threads
in most situations: all you really get from a thread is your
own instruction counter and exit status buffer. Perl's model
(at least as of 5.8) is quite a bit more managable and may
help change people's minds.

Installing a threaded perl is mostly a matter of running
'perl -V' to see the original config arg's, then running
Configure with '-de', a new preifx and threading argument.
It isn't rocket science and if you really are working with
something that needs threads it isn't hard to do.

One thing that works againsed threading is clustering,
which is where the largest systems are heading. If you
think the code may live in a cluster then you have to
use message passing to begin with to support the multi-
host environment.


--
Steven Lembark                               2930 W. Palmer
Workhorse Computing                       Chicago, IL 60647
                                            +1 888 359 3508