What is fork vs threads in Perl?

In Perl, both fork and threads are used to achieve parallelism but operate differently. Forking creates a separate process, while threads are lighter weight and share memory.

Fork

Forking creates an entirely new process that runs concurrently with the parent process. This new process has its own memory space, and any changes made to variables do not affect the original process.

Example of Fork:

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; my $pid = fork(); if (not defined $pid) { die "Fork failed: $!"; } elsif ($pid == 0) { # Child process print "Hello from the child process:\n"; } else { # Parent process print "Hello from the parent process:\n"; }

Threads

Threads allow multiple threads of execution within the same process. Threads share the same memory space, which makes it easier to share data but also introduces complexities such as data corruption if not managed correctly.

Example of Threads:

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use threads; my $thread = threads->create(sub { print "Hello from the thread:\n"; }); $thread->join(); # Wait for the thread to finish

fork threads Perl parallelism process concurrency multithreading

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