I've playing around with forks and forks::shared for some time now - it
looks really nifty. In the past I've been spending too much time
emulating threads in Perl. :/
I am not quite sure when I need to lock. Is "$HASH{foo}++" safe?
In general, increment on a shared variable is not safe. It's safe in the sense that Perl won't crash. It's _not_ save in the sense that you might miss increments. This is because shared variables in Perl are implemented as tied variables, i.e. with a FETCH and STORE. An increment is this basically a FETCH, an increment and a STORE. If second thread does a FETCH before the first one has done the STORE, you have lost 1 increment.
How about "$foo = scalar keys %HASH"? Should a wrap access to shared lists and hashed with tie and lock there?
I'm not sure what you mean here...
Liz
