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Date:      Sun, 1 Mar 2009 16:39:00 +0100
From:      Anton Berezin <tobez@tobez.org>
To:        Oren Maurer <meorero@gmail.com>
Cc:        freebsd-perl@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: How / where to get a Perl that has threads?
Message-ID:  <20090301153900.GB94320@heechee.tobez.org>
In-Reply-To: <b0f44f380903010402g357dea66jb1954d57f4cff931@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <b0f44f380903010005m4010367asc1b54daf3604f61@mail.gmail.com> <49AA6490.7080305@infracaninophile.co.uk> <b0f44f380903010402g357dea66jb1954d57f4cff931@mail.gmail.com>

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On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 02:02:27PM +0200, Oren Maurer wrote:
> Is there a reason for not having threaded Perl as the default?
> Is it matter of History (compatibility with past code)?
> Or internal FreeBSD reason (memory)?

> I have seen other OS's - that do use threaded Perl as default (Linux,
> MSWin32).

The biggest reason is that FreeBSD has a rather small main thread stack
size (2 MB for 32-bit architectures and 4 MB for 64-bit architectures),
and this parameter cannot be changed without recompiling the system threads
library.  Or at least that used to be the case last time I checked, about a
year ago.

So a given Perl program that does NOT use threads will have much smaller
stack when executed in a perl compiled with threads support.  Some large
applications (amavisd-new, IIRC) had problems with that.

Cheers,
\Anton.
-- 
There is no beauty in entropy. -- Eliezer Yudkowsky



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