/ 
Thread-IID-0.04
River stage one • 1 direct dependent • 1 total dependent
/ Thread::IID

NAME

Thread::IID - unique Interpreter IDs

VERSION

version 0.04

SYNOPSIS

use Thread::IID ':all';

print "Hi, I am interpreter #" . interpreter_id;

DESCRIPTION

This provides an identifier to distinguish Perl interpreter instances.

In environments like mod_perl2, where interpreters can be cloned and arbitrarily assigned to OS threads, the thread ID gives no indication of which interpreter instance is actually running and hence which corresponding set of values/data-structures is actually being referenced. For such situations an interpreter ID is more likely to be what you actually want.

EXPORT

None by default. The following function is available:

interpreter_id

Returns an (integer) ID for the Perl interpreter from which this call is being made. Returns 0 if the Perl was not compiled to allow multiple interpreters.

Where multiple interpreters have been created to run in threads of the current process and are concurrently in existence, the IDs returned will be distinct for each interpreter, regardless of which threads are running which interpreters. However, once an interpreter exits and its memory is reclaimed, nothing prevents its ID from being reused. It is also possible for the same ID to be returned from interpreters in different processes (and likely in the event that the processes were created by fork()).

In the current implementation, the Interpreter ID is derived from the memory address of the PerlInterpreter structure.

EXAMPLE

In the following

my @value = (0, interpreter_id, $$, time);
sleep(1);

sub counter {
    ++$value[0];
    return @value;
}

counter() is guaranteed to return a list value distinct from all other invocations in all processes/threads that are running this code on a given host.

AUTHOR

Roger Crew <crew@cs.stanford.edu>.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The original XS code for this was from a posting by ikegami at PerlMonks.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2011 by Roger Crew.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.1 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.