Creating a new process can be expensive.

Just for kicks, read the code required to create a new thread in Perl. Any operating system that can't launch a new process more quickly than Perl can launch a new thread is severely broken.

If you like threads better, that's fine, but this line of reasoning doesn't hold much water. You're probably going to hit the kernel when creating a thread — you need things like memory, at some point. You're going to hit the scheduler, at some point, at least with system threads. (Of course, that's not what Perl has.)

Throwing out handwavy performance arguments altogether, your arguments are:

I'd also add that sharing data between threads tends to be nicer than messing with shared memory portably, mostly because Unix shared memory never really made sense to me. That, to me, is a compelling reason. I mostly ignore the others.


In reply to Re: Why use threads over processes, or why use processes over threads? by chromatic
in thread Why use threads over processes, or why use processes over threads? by pg

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