A recent column in Software Development Times lamented the lack of support for threading in software today. In it, Andrew Binstock says:

Dynamic languages are even further behind. To wit, Python, allows only one thread to run at a time (except for I/O); this means you can have threads but not running in parallel. Ruby can run threads only within the one VM, which is arguably better but nowhere near good enough. And OpenMP, which might be a solution for some, is limited to C++ or Fortran.

Unfortunately, Binstock ignores the dynamic language that should be first on his mind, Perl. Perl's threading got stable back with Perl 5.8.7 in 2005, after a few years of experimental support. Today, Mac OS X and most Linux distributions ship with a threaded Perl enabled.

How can you tell if your Perl supports threads? Look at the output of perl -V for the string "useithreads":

$ perl -V | grep ithreads
config_args='-ds -e -Dprefix=/usr -Dccflags=-g  -pipe  -Dldflags=-Dman3ext=3pm -Duseithreads -Duseshrplib'
usethreads=define use5005threads=undef useithreads=define usemultiplicity=define

While I agree with the basic premise that demand for threaded apps on the desktop is low, the tools for supporting threads are not quite as sparse as Binstock would have us think.

P.S. O'Reilly & Associates is now O'Reilly Media, and has been since April 2004.