From owner-freebsd-perl@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Oct 21 15:46:31 2010 Return-Path: Delivered-To: perl@FreeBSD.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E3BD7106564A for ; Thu, 21 Oct 2010 15:46:31 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from tom@FreeBSD.org) Received: from eborcom.com (pochard.scrubhole.org [62.3.122.102]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 33C4B8FC12 for ; Thu, 21 Oct 2010 15:46:30 +0000 (UTC) Received: (qmail 38677 invoked by uid 1001); 21 Oct 2010 15:19:48 -0000 Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 16:19:48 +0100 From: Tom Hukins To: perl@FreeBSD.org Message-ID: <20101021151948.GA38571@eborcom.com> Mail-Followup-To: perl@FreeBSD.org References: <20101021165220.d72ae16c.ehaupt@FreeBSD.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20101021165220.d72ae16c.ehaupt@FreeBSD.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.2i Cc: Subject: Re: start building thread support for lang/perl5.12 by default 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: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 15:46:32 -0000 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