Possible to pass a member function to spawn?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:38:03 -0500, Oliver Puerto <saxo123 at gmx.de> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'm very new to D. Just started reading "The D programming language". I  
> should read it from beginning to end before posting questions here. I  
> know ... But I'm just too impatient. The issue seems not to be that  
> simple, nevertheless. The code below compiles with Visual Studio.
>
> I want to have something like my actor class that I can start running in  
> it's own thread like in Scala or other languages that support actors. So  
> at best, I would like to do something like this:
>
>     MyActor myActor = new MyActor();
>     auto tid = spawn(&start, &myActor.run());
>
> However, this doesn't work. So I came up with the solution below where  
> the start function is called with myActor as an argument.

Welcome to D!

Unfortunately, it looks like functions are the only runnable types via  
spawn.  There should technically be a delegate version, and then you would  
be able to do:

auto tid = spawn(&myActor.run);

which would run the run() method of myActor in a separate thread.  I'm not  
sure what the technical limitation, but I think it has to do with  
guarantees that no unshared data is passed (I don't believe it was  
possible to detect a shared delegate vs. a non-shared one, that may have  
changed).

For now, your method of using spawn is correct.

You should note that the current implementation is not quite finished, and  
some pieces of TDPL will not work yet.  We are getting there, though!

Also, for future reference, the newsgroup digitalmars.D.learn is more  
appropriate for these types of questions.

-Steve