I agree that threads are generelly a difficult issue to cope. What is worse, there are a lot of Java-developers who tell us, that it is not difficult for them, but in the end the software fails on the productive system, for example because the load is different then on the test system, causing different threads to be slowed down to a different extent etc. So people who are having difficulties with multithreading still use them a lot and don't admit the difficulties and they might not even appear during testing...
Even though I did see software that heavily uses multithreading and works well. On the other hand I think that there are certain tasks that need to use some kind of parallelism, either for making use of parallel CPU infrastructure or for implementing patterns that can more easily be expressed using something like multithreading. I think that the approach of running several processes instead of several threads is something that can be considered in some cases, but I think it does come with a performance price tag that might not be justified in all situations. Maybe the actor model from Scala is worth looking at, at least the Scala-guys claim that that solves the issue, but I don't know if that concept can easily be adapted for Perl 6. Best regards, Karl
