Something that has always struck me as odd is that ithreads, the one true threads implementation for perl, is pretty closed minded.

Personally I liked the old Thread way of doing it better. I prefer having everything shared by default, because i find the process of explicitly sharing tedious and more error prone than making sure I don't get into race conditions. Some would argue that it's better, because unshared data will be barked about, but deadlocks aren't really detectible. So what?

What about a third way of doing it? No variables are shared by default, but data is: you can put a reference in a shared variable, and dereference any length of nested structures from it, in another thread.

And so on, and so forth.

So why isn't there another way? Is there going to be another way? Are ithreads going to become lax enough in the future to allow there to be another way without there really being another way?

Here are some other ways I know, but they aren't really satisfactory:

• Event and it's friends for event loops. You get the illusion of concurrency.
• forks - so close to ithreads conceptually (from a programming perspective), that it's a drop in replacement. It really stresses the fact that ithreads are not really what I want from threads...
• Thread - depracated. I don't want to write new code for a feature which I know is going away sometime soon.
• Coro - Not really threads, implements it all in user space. Perhaps as good as it gets? Kind of sucky, since my work horses are all SMP.

So, given only these alternatives, and only one (real) way to do it, what is a boy to do?

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