I'm replying to me because I don't have a reply button for jrockway's response.
When you use the word "threads", most people are going to assume you mean OS threads because that is what most of the world means. Hence this subdiscussion with bladsel about having a lot of OS threads.
If you think that, then you think wrong. I am fully aware that there are plenty of alternatives to that model. I wouldn't choose to use them in Perl, but they exist.
Which is why what I said earlier in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=866558 (back when I thought that by "lightweight thread" you meant something like a thread in the JVM) boils down to, "Here is the standard way to do it in Perl. If you want to take this other type of approach using a similar class of scripting language, I would recommend one of these alternate implementations of Ruby or Python."
Thanks for the tip on getting around the lack of a reply button.
When you use the word "threads", most people are going to assume you mean OS threads because that is what most of the world means. Hence this subdiscussion with bladsel about having a lot of OS threads.