[sf-perl] scalars leaked - perl ithreads history lesson

[James Briggs]

On Mon, 25 Apr 2011 20:21:15 -0700, Michael Friedman wrote
> I ran into similar problems (though not that particular message) 
> with using threads on perl 5.8.6. After much hair-pulling I gave up 
> on using real threads and installed "forks" from CPAN. It uses the 
> same API as threads, but forks off a new perl interpreter for each 
> one. It's not as fast as using threads would be, but a) it works now 
> and b) I won't have to change the logic when we do finally upgrade 
> to a more modern version of perl. You might want to check it out.
> 
> -- Mike

FYI, Gurusamy Sarathy did a lot of the debugging to make perl ithreads
almost work about 5 years ago. ActiveState needed reliable threads
for their mail filter (milter) product written in Perl.

He did a couple of great talks on that at the Perl Conference in San Diego.

The result worked well enough that Sophos bought ActiveState for
that product, he became CTO, and then Sophos spun off the tools group
into the new ActiveState.

So I guess the lesson is try the latest Perl, and if threads still
don't work, man up and fix it, or try something else. :)

James.