Possible to pass a member function to spawn?

[James Miller]

It is also worth noting that the reason delegates are not eligible for
thread spawn is that delegates hold references from outside their
definition. This means that delegates can hold references to data that
outside their thread, thus breaking the rule that all data is
thread-local unless specified otherwise.

The compiler could try to reason about your program and figure out
that your "delegate" doesn't actually access cross-thread data, but
that is very, very hard to prove. D's design is not suited to the
Actor model, at least not without some modification.

On 7 February 2012 13:16, Steven Schveighoffer <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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