Threads have a big issue: they are not encapsulable.

You can not blindly create a thread in the middle of your program because doing it duplicates all the structures in the program memory. If your script is using 1Gb of memory and you create a thread, it immediately goes to 2Gb and if then you create another thread, it goes to 3Gb, etc. Replicating those data structures may also be quite expensive in terms of CPU usage.

For instance, imagine you want to query several HTTP servers in parallel. Threads look like a good match for that, so you build a module using threads, you test it and it runs fine. But then, when you use it from some data processing script that holds big datasets in memory everything goes nuts.

With the current thread support in Perl you can only use them at the high level designing your program around.

In reply to Re: Trying to Understand the Discouragement of Threads by salva
in thread Trying to Understand the Discouragement of Threads by benwills

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.