std.concurrency extension

[Jose Armando Garcia]

On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 7:07 PM, jdrewsen <jdrewsen at nospam.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>   Currently each thread spawned has an associated Tid when using
> std.concurrency. When calling receive() this is always the Tid (and
> associated messagebox) that you receive from.
>
> This becomes a problem when you spawn several worker threads that send
> messages to the main thread since each call to receive must know how to
> handle all kind on messages.
>
> For example: the current version of the curl wrapper I'm working on receives
> HTTP data from worker threads using receive. The user of this wrapper can
> also create his own worker threads that will send data to the main thread.
> This means that the curl wrapper must be able to handle the users worker
> thread messages.
>
> The GO language has solved this problem with channels. My suggestion is to
> allow a thread to create additional Tids that can act just like channels.
> Then by adding a receive() call that accepts a Tid as first argument we can
> use them as channels.
>
> e.g.
> -------------------------------------------------
> void run() {
>        auto channel1 = receiveOnly!Tid();
>        channel1.send("Hello world);
> }
>
> Tid channel1 = Tid();
> auto tid1 = spawn(&run);
> tid.send(channel1);
>
> // receive only from the specified work on the channel
> writeln(channel1.receiveOnly!string());
> -------------------------------------------------
>
> This would decouple handling of different worker threads if needed.
>
> This is something I need for the curl wrapper I think. I can create patch
> for this if it is something that will be accepted upstream?
>
> /Jonas
>

If I was you I would build channels on top of Tid/mbox. How you do you
efficiently wait on multiple channels?