--I still consider myself a perl beginner, but have used perl about 2 years...
I posted my feature request on the iThreads forum over a week ago to get their opinion, but it isn't
very active, so I just decided to put my request here and see what the experts have to say!
As a Win32er, I am glad to see fork() and ithreads in the latest perl! It helps me to understand
and tryout unix/linux techniques...
One thing that I feel is missing and *might* be easy to add is to also emulate exec() --I know there is already an exec(), but in all of the unix/linux examples and coding techniques they use fork()->exec() to start a new process quickly (since the fork() uses COW, it doesn't actually do anything, and just does the exec() in the new process, which is fast under unix/linux [my understanding anyway]).
I would like to have, under win32 anyway, the ability to call fork() and then exec() and have it create a new ithread w/o any data copying. It would just be a new thread that loads the perl interpreter. With that new thread, it would probably just load the standard modules, and you would have to add any others you wanted manually (and IPC would be your responsibility).
Since creating processes under win32 is very slow (in comparison anyway),
It would really help some of us win32ers if we could create a couple of
worker threads that were independent(ie like a new process) and then do
background processing and IPC ourselves. Another good example is if you
have a Tk program and want to create a new thread, you don't (and really
can't) use fork() because you don't want to duplicate data and accidently
mess something up. But if I had an independent thread, I could do some work
and w/o the overhead of creating a new process!
thanks for considering this!!!
-- keep on rockin' in a perl world
