how to handle shared arrays?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, June 22, 2012 11:09:13 maarten van damme wrote:
> It looks a bit "dirty" to
> convert to immutable and back to mutable simply to pass it over to
> another thread...

It is, but casting to shared and back again is pretty much the same thing. So, 
in most cases, you're going to end up doing  one or the other if you're trying 
to pass ownership across threads rather than sending an immutable duplicate 
across. It would be great if there were a way in the type system to model 
transfering ownership from one thread to another, but there isn't (if nothing 
else, because it's not easy to do), so you get to choose between transferring 
ownship using "dirty" casts and duplicating data to send it across. Certainly, 
if efficiency isn't an issue, iduping is safer, since it's @safe rather than 
@system.

- Jonathan M Davis