Gonna be up most of the night finishing project #2 for my distributed systems class. (They call it "operating systems 2," but I sure didn't get to do any of the neat operating systems stuff I was hoping for. Looks like I'll just have to read my Linux Kernel Internals book on my own if I want to have any fun.)
Our projects in this class are supposed to be in Java. There's a lot of client/server type stuff, and this second project uses CORBA. For the first project, I managed to find an excuse to write a test scaffolding program in Perl (which connected to each server and sent initialization information and a start signal). Haven't found an excuse for this project, yet, but I'm looking for one.
I've mostly liked Java, but I'm one of those people who never really met an OO program he didn't like. I like exceptions. But the thing I really like is threads. Most of what we're doing wouldn't be possible if we couldn't have multithreaded peer-to-peer apps playing client and server with each other many times over. I'd tremble to try the same thing in Perl.
Haven't heard news on iThreads or anything else about Perl threads in a long time. What's the status? Are we reentrant, yet? The last killer functionality Perl needs for me is reliable threads. And if I had them I'd be prototyping all this in Perl, showing it off to my TA and professor, and trying to get away with turning in Perl versions.
