That is a good question... a leftover from the normal operation of packing ints for copying via shared memory. I was under the assumption that the pack function is the only way to get the data written as a byte sequence into the shared memory. Are you suggesting I can write that into the shared memory block as is?
Trying to read it back from the shared memory block doesn't bode well:
%somehash = %{thaw($shm_somehash->read(0, 1024))};
causes:
Byte order is not compatible at /System/Library/Perl/5.18/darwin-thread-multi-2level/Storable.pm line 417, at ./test.pl line 47