IPC is weakness of multiprocess models, and I'm disappointed that everyone has been content to stick to the same IPC mechanisms which have been around since day one. I'd rather prefer if the amount of effort that has gone into threads in the Unix world at large had gone into making it easier for forked processes to communicate when they need to. A highlevel language like Perl where variables are more than just names for memory locations offers particularly great opportunities to hide much of the drudgework of IPC from the programmer.

Defaulting to no shared memory is inherently safer than defaulting to all memory being shared, and on modern CPUs with useful MMUs forking doesn't even cost a single extra cycle. Threads are implemented in terms of fork() in the Linux kernel.

Threads are mainly useful as a way to regain some of the fork() semantics on amputated platforms that don't natively offer something equivalent. Indeed, the iThreads you so like, in various respects behave more like forked processes than like ye olde threads.

Makeshifts last the longest.