How you guys go about -BetterC Multithreading?

[Petar]

On Thursday, 9 November 2017 at 13:00:15 UTC, ParticlePeter wrote:
> On Thursday, 9 November 2017 at 12:19:00 UTC, Petar Kirov 
> [ZombineDev] wrote:
>> On Thursday, 9 November 2017 at 11:08:21 UTC, ParticlePeter 
>> wrote:
>>> Any experience reports or general suggestions?
>>> I've used only D threads so far.
>>
>> It would be far easier if you use druntime + @nogc and/or 
>> de-register latency-sensitive threads from druntime [1], so 
>> they're not interrupted even if some other thread calls the 
>> GC. Probably the path of least resistance is to call [2] and 
>> queue @nogc tasks on [3].
>>
>> If you really want to pursue the version(D_BetterC) route, 
>> then you're essentially on your own to use the threading 
>> facilities provided by your target OS, e.g.:
>>
>> https://linux.die.net/man/3/pthread_create
>> https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms682516(v=vs.85).aspx
>>
>> Though you need to be extra careful not to use thread-local 
>> storage (e.g. only shared static and __gshared) and not to 
>> rely on (shared) static {con|de}structors, dynamic arrays, 
>> associative arrays, exceptions, classes, RAII, etc., which is 
>> really not worth it, unless you're writing very low-level code 
>> (e.g. OS kernels and drivers).
>>
>> [1]: https://dlang.org/phobos/core_thread#.thread_detachThis
>> [2]: https://dlang.org/phobos/core_memory#.GC.disable
>> [3]: https://dlang.org/phobos/std_parallelism#.taskPool
>
> Forgot to mention, I'll try this first, I think its a good 
> first step towards -BetterC usage. But in the end I want to see 
> how far I can get with the -BetterC feature.

In short, the cost / benefit of going all the way 
version(D_BetterC) is incredibly poor for regular applications, 
as you end up a bit more limited than with modern C++ (> 11) for 
prototyping. For example, even writers of D real-time audio 
plugins don't go as far.
If you're writing libraries, especially math-heavy template code, 
CTFE and generic code in general, then version(D_BetterC) is a 
useful tool for verifying that your library doesn't need 
unnecessary dependencies preventing it from being trivially 
integrated in foreign language environments.

Well if you like generic code as much as I do, you can surely do 
great with version(D_BetterC) even for application code, but you 
would have to make alomst every non-builtin type that you use in 
your code a template parameter (or alternatively an extern 
(C++/COM) interface if that works in -betterC), so you can easily 
swap druntime/phobos-based implementations for your custom ones, 
one by one, but I guess few people would be interested in 
following this path.