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Comment by zenspider | Hacker News Reader

perl threading was (and I'm sure still is) absolutely horrid.

I'd be interested in seeing the results of a rewrite not to C, but to python or ruby where the threading support is much much better. Then you could rewrite functions at a time in C as needed, but not have the extra burden of rewriting the whole thing.

I totally agree with the rest of the approach. Going low tech and using unix tools is a very good way to reduce overhead, increase parallelism, and delay calculations. One of the nice things about this approach is you can cobble up another $50 unix box to do some of the bulk processing via nfs or other means.

Congrats... It sounds like a very interesting project.

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Threading support is better in python than in perl? I'm not familiar with perls threading model (or libraries), but this seems wrong - considering things like the GIL in python.

Could you elaborate a bit on this?

I'm much more familiar with threads in ruby. It would actually be a real boon to this project imo.

I don't have as much experience with python threads as I do ruby. I've toyed with the internals of python and perl as well and know perl to be a wasteland and python to be rather elegantly clean. So I would expect python's threads to be better implemented. Poking at it, it does appear to be so.

Doesn't ruby only have green threads?

Yes - unless its jruby then they are non green (forget the term for it at this time of the morning).

yes... and they're great. Esp for situations like the OP was describing. Fire off a ton of incredibly lightweight threads and they'll quietly sit waiting for IO... perfect.

The thing with perl threads is that pretty much nobody uses them. They work fine, as far as I know, but with a default 16MB stack size and "share nothing" semantics don't start more than a few. Perl is more unix centric and people just prefer to fork and use the well baked IPC mechanisms. Various libraries such as POE make fork+IPC easy enough that it's hard to see the need for threads in the kinds of domains where a language like perl is applicable.

people just prefer to fork and use the well baked IPC mechanisms

Ahh, that makes sense. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of perl code runs on *nix systems (I know that with the exception of one app, all the perl I've ever written was only run on linux servers).

they certainly didn't work fine when I tried to use them... after they'd gone into production releases of perl, the canonical demo/example scripts that were out there all crashed the perl runtime in a fiery horrible death.

I can only hope that it has improved since then, but I've moved on to greener pastures.

They were clearly marked as experimental in the documentation all the way up to recent 5.8 releases. From what I hear they work fine now.

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