Re: Do threads support SMP?

Steven W McDougall writes:
 > Does Perl6 support Symmetric MultiProcessing (SMP)?

 > 1 No

 > 1.2 Cons
 > We don't get SMP. SMP is a nyah, nyah issue. Without SMP, Perl will
 > have trouble outgrowing its toy/scripting language reputation.

You left out the biggest con of not having preemptive threads on a
single-processor system.  If a thread calls some external C subroutine
that blocks on a system call (or just takes a really long time to
complete), your entire program blocks until the external subroutine
returns control to the Perl interpreter so it can start switching
threads again.

If you wrote the external subroutine, you may be able to call yield()
in appropriate places.  But if the subroutine is in some library that
is not closely associated with Perl, that may be impossible.

-- 
Chris Madsen              http://www.trx.com      [email protected]
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