Re: Threaded Perl

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On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 11:26:50AM -0500, Henry Hartley wrote:
> 
> I've set up a FC3 box and want to run Interchange
> (http://www.icdevgroup.org/) on it.  The default perl on Fedora Core
> (and this was true with RHL since 8) has threading turned on.
> Interchange requires that threading be dissabled in order to run.  Now,
> I've grabbed the source and rebuilt perl and things are basically
> working but out of curiosity, is the decision to enable threads in FC's
> perl one that anyone would be willing to reconsider?  Is threaded perl
> required by enough people at this point to justify it?  Here's a piece
> of a thread (admitedly it's a bit old - from April 2003) discussing the
> topic.

[snip]

The author of that article seems to be conflating two topics; the use of a
perl interpreter with thread-support compiled in, and actually making use
of the thread facilities. I am not aware of any significant bugs that affect
a single-threaded program running on a ithread-enabled perl interpreter
that don't also appear with a 'vanilla' interpeter. Thus Interchange
should work just as well on both interpeters, *unless* there is a specific
reason which the article doesn't mention.

As to whether Interchange would work successfully in a multi-threaded Perl
application is an entirely different matter; I can well believe that it
doesn't; lots of Perl code and modules don't, as they haven't been
specifically written or modified to be thread-safe.

The first version of Perl to make an ithreads API accessible to the user
was version 5.8.0, released in July 2002, and yes, there were a lot of
threads-related bugs in it; since then three have been 6 further releases,
(current is 5.8.6; FC3 has 5.8.5), and there have been a lot of
threads-related fixes during that time, many of them by me.

So I can't see any major reason for not making the default perl compiler
ithread-enabled.

Dave

-- 
"Foul and greedy Dwarf - you have eaten the last candle."
    -- "Hordes of the Things", BBC Radio.


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