From owner-freebsd-perl@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Mar 1 15:39:01 2009 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-perl@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B8E5F1065702 for ; Sun, 1 Mar 2009 15:39:01 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from tobez@tobez.org) Received: from heechee.tobez.org (heechee.tobez.org [194.255.56.42]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7EB238FC18 for ; Sun, 1 Mar 2009 15:39:01 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from tobez@tobez.org) Received: by heechee.tobez.org (Postfix, from userid 1001) id DB78D6D401; Sun, 1 Mar 2009 16:39:00 +0100 (CET) Date: Sun, 1 Mar 2009 16:39:00 +0100 From: Anton Berezin To: Oren Maurer Message-ID: <20090301153900.GB94320@heechee.tobez.org> References: <49AA6490.7080305@infracaninophile.co.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: X-Powered-By: FreeBSD http://www.freebsd.org/ User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.19 (2009-01-05) Cc: freebsd-perl@freebsd.org Subject: Re: How / where to get a Perl that has threads? X-BeenThere: freebsd-perl@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: maintainer of a number of perl-related ports List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:39:02 -0000 On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 02:02:27PM +0200, Oren Maurer wrote: > Is there a reason for not having threaded Perl as the default? > Is it matter of History (compatibility with past code)? > Or internal FreeBSD reason (memory)? > I have seen other OS's - that do use threaded Perl as default (Linux, > MSWin32). The biggest reason is that FreeBSD has a rather small main thread stack size (2 MB for 32-bit architectures and 4 MB for 64-bit architectures), and this parameter cannot be changed without recompiling the system threads library. Or at least that used to be the case last time I checked, about a year ago. So a given Perl program that does NOT use threads will have much smaller stack when executed in a perl compiled with threads support. Some large applications (amavisd-new, IIRC) had problems with that. Cheers, \Anton. -- There is no beauty in entropy. -- Eliezer Yudkowsky