I'm still getting used to this whole anonymous monk thing

Why remain anonymous?

Anyway, you're kinda making my point for me. Again.

The point being that it is extremely difficult to do even very, very simple things using the pthreads API--at least, as exposed to Perl through threads. It's too late for Perl 5, but Perl 6 needs something much better.

It's a little like the difference between the raw sockets calls that perl exposes, and using IO::Socket::INET, except that with for a threading api to be useful within Perl, it need to be architected into the language, declaratively, not bolted through as an after thought.

I also will contend that native threads alone are not enough, but the arguments supporting that are complex and are taking me some time and a lot of research to put together. Unfortunately, the inadaquacies of threads and the restrictions the implementations impose upon it's use, mean that it is hard to come up with convicing demonstrations of what is possible, and as we've seen, arguments alone are not enough.