std.parallelism: Request for Review

[dsimcha]

On 2/28/2011 7:22 AM, Don wrote:
> Russel Winder wrote:
>> I accept your argument about core.cpuid and so will not investigate it
>> further, other than to say it needs to work on 64-bit processors as well
>> as 32-bit ones. The campaign now must be to have an OS query capability
>> to find the number of processors.
>
> Yes, it definitely needs to be a priority. It's a fundamental function
> for a modern system programming language.
>
> I'm not sure where this stuff should go, probably not into core.cpuid.
> I could imagine something with a name like std.sysinfo, which dealt with
> system configuration, and also provided OS-independent abstractions for
> things like setting process affinity.
> I think it should go into std.parallelism for now.

Done.  This was actually much easier than I thought.  I didn't 
document/expose it, though, because I didn't put any thought into 
creating an API for it.  I just implemented the bare minimum to make 
std.parallelism work properly.

https://github.com/dsimcha/std.parallelism/commit/db7751ba436af3f7ffcaa1b65070f3981a75f98a

This code is tested (at least on my hardware) on Windows 7 and Ubuntu 
10.10 in both 32 and 64 mode.  I did not test on Mac OS because I don't 
own any such hardware, though it **should** work because Mac OS is also 
POSIX.  Someone please confirm.

BTW, I don't imagine we care about supporting ancient (pre-Windows 2000) 
Windows.  The Windows code will only work for Win2k and up.