Should I enable threads in my new perl 5.8.0? They seem to be off by default.
Not sure how much I'll use them for awhile, especially at work. (Might play with them at home, though.)
I tried RC2 with threads on and everything I could feed it worked perfectly well. Of course, that's not a good enough reason to put it into production, but I know that personally: 1) I'll be building with threads always unless I run into a show stopper and 2) I'll be playing with them enough that it's reasonable to expect that within the next few months I'll release things on CPAN that will require them. Point 2 is of course the important one because I'm certain that I'm not the only one and that people far more knowledgeable than I with threads will start (and in fact have) to put thread-only modules out there that will most likely be useful. It's too important a feature to miss imho.
If anyone (provided they could) built 5.8 without Unicode support or without perlio support I'd honestly ignore requests for support in my modules using those (and might even reject patches if it made them too complex). I don't account for a large part of CPAN but I expect I'm not the only one thinking that way. Besides, 5.6 was far from being sufficiently adopted while it had really nice extra features, and a lot of us are waiting relentlessly for people to use more advanced Perls...
So to make a diatribe short, I'd say go with threads unless you have a truly compelling reason not to. The more people enable them the less the creative instincts of CPAN-contributers will be limited!
