tk, by default, compiles with pthread
ruby ships with exteensive bindings to tk and so has to be kept
compatible to use ruby and tk together.
that's the only reason i can think of.

^ manveru

On 6/7/08, Sean O'Halpin <sean.ohalpin / gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 4, 2007 at 5:53 AM, Adam Kramer <akramer / google.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I was seeing significant performance differences between ruby 1.8.4 on
>> an old distribution and a newer one. I spent some hours tracking down
>> the differences and it appears that --enable-pthread causes ruby to be
>> significantly slower.
> [snip]
>> Has anyone else witnessed this? Is this a "feature" that's to be expected?
>
> Yes, we've hit this - in Centos 5, the default ruby build is 1.8.5 (!)
> with --enable-pthread. What I'd like to know is why[1]? Is it just
> hand-waving conservatism (just-in-case-we-need-it), RedHat policy to
> enable pthreads everywhere or is there a specific reason why pthreads
> have to be enabled, e.g. there's an Oracle driver that requires it or
> some such?
>
> Anyone have any ideas?
>
> Regards,
> Sean
>
> [1] Apart from why anyone thinks putting an unstable version of ruby
> in their distro is a good idea
>
>