note BrentDax <blockquote><i>Now you may wonder why Perl ithreads didn't use fork()? Wouldn't that have made a lot more sense? Well, I wasn't involved in the thread design process at the time, so I have no idea what the exact reasons were.</i></blockquote> <p> Hysterical raisins--surprisingly good ones, but still hysterical raisins. ithreads were originally developed to emulate <i>fork</i>(1) on Windows, which doesn't have such a call; thus, they couldn't be built on <i>fork</i>. </p> <p> Besides, as your <code>forks</code> module demonstrates, most of the speed wins of using <i>fork</i>(1) on systems that have it would be lost in the interthread communications. The general consensus seems to be that you should use ithreads in code with a lot of interthread communications, a magic <i>open</i> (or such) in code with a little communication, and a raw <i>fork</i> in code with very little communcation. </p> <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-59600"> <P>=cut<BR> --Brent Dax<BR> There is no sig. </div></div> 288022 288022