Shared socket object among Perl threads - multithreading

Question

I am trying to create a socket object that can be shared among threads. The following code does not work because socket object is a GLOB. How could the socket object be shared? Can it be done this way?
my $socket1 = IO::Socket::INET->new(
Proto => "tcp",
PeerAddr => "localhost",
PeerPort => "888",
) or die "couldn't connect: $!";
my $socket_shared =shared_clone($socket1);
....
my $thr1 = threads->create(\&Thread_1);
$thr1->join();
sub Thread_1 {
lock($socket_cpy);
my $data = "Msg.\n";
$socket1->send($data);
$socket1->recv($data,1024);
}
ERROR: Unsupported ref type: GLOB at line (7 here, where the shared_clone is called).

Answer 1

Can I suggest instead that you don't try and share a socket between threads? That feels like something that's going to be asking for concurrency issues between them.
Whilst there are (probably) ways of doing that, I'd suggest instead - have a single thread 'responsible' for the IO, and use something like Thread::Queue to interact with it.
E.g. something like:
use strict;
use warnings;
use threads;
use Thread::Queue;
my $output_q = Thread::Queue->new();
my $nthreads = 1;
sub socket_thread {
my $socket1 = IO::Socket::INET->new(
Proto => "tcp",
PeerAddr => "localhost",
PeerPort => "888",
) or die "couldn't connect: $!";
while ( my $data = $output_q->dequeue() ) {
$socket1->send($data);
$socket1->recv( $data, 1024 );
}
}
sub worker_thread {
$output_q->enqueue( "Some text from thread: ",
threads->self->tid(), "\n" );
}
for ( 1 .. $nthreads ) {
threads->create( \&worker_thread );
}
foreach my $thr ( threads->list() ) {
$thr->join();
}
That way you don't need to pass the socket around at all, you can use one or more queues to serialise your IO. This - to my mind - is one of the stronger reasons to thread in perl in the first place - you've better IPC mechanisms to work with.
Otherwise I'd be tempted to suggest using forks, which (on Unix) are generally more efficient.