Possible to pass a member function to spawn?

[foobar]

On Tuesday, 7 February 2012 at 23:10:02 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On 8 February 2012 00:33, Sean Kelly <sean at invisibleduck.org> 
> wrote:
>
>> On Feb 6, 2012, at 1:38 PM, Oliver Puerto 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());
>>
>> This should work:
>>
>> void runActor(shared MyActor a) { (cast(MyActor)a)).run(); }
>> MyActor myActor = new MyActor();
>> auto tid = spawn(cast(shared MyActor) myActor, &runActor);
>>
>
> See, my conclusion is, whenever using this API, you inevitably 
> have dog
> ugly code. That code is barely readable through the casts... I 
> can only
> draw this up to faulty API design.
> I understand the premise of 'shared'-ness that the API is 
> trying to
> assert/guarantee, but the concept is basically broken in the 
> language. You
> can't use this API at all with out these blind casts, which is, 
> basically,
> a hack, and I am yet to see an example of using this API 
> 'properly'. The
> casts are totally self defeating.
>
>
>> std.concurrency really should allow unique references to a 
>> non-shared type
>> to be passed as well, using something similar to assumeUnique.
>
>
> Something like that should exist in the language (... or shared 
> should just
> not be broken). Using a template like assumeUnique is no better 
> than the
> ugly cast. What does it offer over a cast?

IMO the shared *concept* itself is broken. I'd suggest to take a 
look at languages such as chapel and x10 to see their designs. 
E.g http://chapel.cray.com/tutorials/SC11/SC11-5-Locales.pdf 
discusses the concept of locales and the "on" construct. This 
allows to specify where each statement is performed and the 
runtime automatically handles for you the implementation details 
of migrating data.