Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 16:19:48 +0100 From: Tom Hukins <tom@FreeBSD.org> To: perl@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: start building thread support for lang/perl5.12 by default Message-ID: <20101021151948.GA38571@eborcom.com> In-Reply-To: <20101021165220.d72ae16c.ehaupt@FreeBSD.org> References: <20101021165220.d72ae16c.ehaupt@FreeBSD.org>
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On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 04:52:20PM +0200, Emanuel Haupt wrote: > May I suggest to start enabling thread support for lang/perl5.12 by > default. While thread support was considered unstable for a long time > it has become more stable with perl 5.12. I suggest we keep the default of not supporting threaded applications. The stability of threads doesn't matter: applications written in Perl either need them or they don't. If an application doesn't need threads it won't encounter thread-related instability. If an application needs threads, it needs them. Any perl binary built with threading support runs slower than a comparable binary without threading support regardless of whether an application uses threads or not. Shipping a thread-enabled perl by default will cause users' applications to run slower by default. Specific applications or ports that need threads can install a threaded perl port or package. > Finally, many Linux distributions have started to ship perl with thread > support by default (eg. RHEL5). We use RedHat at work and build our own perl binary largely to avoid the slowness of threaded perls. We also build with PERL_DISABLE_PMC and NO_MATHOMS for further performance improvements. One of my colleagues is an ex-pumpking and has benchmarked these although he doesn't have any numbers to hand. Tom
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