The important thing to me is a reliable abstraction that Does What I Mean.

What's wrong with this?

It has locks.

BrowserUK missed that on the first go, and had to add them later. So, it's not a clean abstraction. If ikegami hand't stepped in, we might have had a subtle, hard to find bug. (There's several layers of dialogue between these two about that, and these are smart people, so that's what I'm talking about parallelism being very hard to wrap your mind around.)

Here, it seems like not such a big deal. But the coded that I wanted to parallelize was also an artificually simple example.

The point is, you couldn't just cut and paste code that was executing serially, and change it in one place, and have it executing parallelly. Close maybe, but not quite. But what if my example hadn't been so simple? What if there had been two loops I wanted to processes parallely; what if they interacted somehow? Pain.

That said, I am giving this code a careful study to see if I can apply it to the threadedreduce stub code I am working on at Re^2: Could there be a ThreadedMapReduce (instead of DistributedMapReduce)?

Is this too complicated for you?

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use threads;
use threads::shared::Scalar;

my $shared = threads::shared::Scalar->new;

for ( 1.. 10 ) {
    async {
        sleep 1 + rand 3;
        $shared->value .= ":$_";
    };
}
$_->join for threads->list;
print $shared->value;

__END__
C:\test>579015
:1:2:3:5:6:9:4:7:8:10

C:\test>579015
:1:2:6:9:3:5:7:10:4:8

C:\test>579015
:4:5:6:7:8:9:3:1:2:10
[download]

Update: A slightly simpler version:

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use threads::shared::Scalar;

our $T ||= 10;
our $N ||= 1000;

my $shared = threads::shared::Scalar->new;

for( 1 .. $T ) {
    async{
        for( 1 .. $N ) {
            $shared->value++;
        }
    };
}
waitall;
print $shared->value;
__END__
C:\test>sharedScalar.plt -T=1000 -N=1000
1000000
C:\test>sharedScalar.plt -T=500 -N=1000
500000
C:\test>sharedScalar.plt -T=500 -N=12345
6172500
C:\test>sharedScalar.plt -T=123 -N=10
1230
[download]

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.