Fibers and async io stuff for beginners

[Jens Bauer via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Thursday, 23 April 2015 at 19:24:31 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Thursday, 23 April 2015 at 16:57:30 UTC, Jens Bauer wrote:
>> 3: Audio mixing and playback (eg. a MOD player for instance).
>> 5: Queueing up a bunch of different jobs;
>
> At the moment I'm using threads to implement a speech 
> synthesizer. It waits for input, synthesizes it, and then 
> "speaks" in a separate thread. If new input comes, the speaking 
> thread is stopped. I wonder, if fibers would be a viable 
> alternative to threads (after all audio playback was mentioned 
> in the list above).

I'll try and give you some (perhaps useless) input... :)

I think there are a number of good possibilities for spreading 
out the jobs.
First thought is to split every job on spaces; eg. every word is 
a separate job, some words may be possible to "recycle" either 
fully or partly, depending on how they're pronounced in the 
particular context.
I cannot give any conclusions, but I do see that ...
Using multiple CPU cores with each their own Fiber would probably 
be the most optimal solution. Each Fiber could perhaps synthesize 
a word at a time.
-But I do not know if you're able to control which core your 
Fiber is running on.

That would of course only generate the data (faster than 
real-time on most systems).
An audio frame-buffer interrupt could 'pull' the data, when 
necessary. Such an interrupt could also mix multiple voices 
(having different/variable volume and panning) if needed (here 
I'm thinking of 'speaking' the conversations in a chat-room).