Proposal for a MessageQueue (was Re: public MessageBox)

[Paulo Pinto]

Making such interface public would even allow to integrate D communication 
mechanisms
between processes/machines, similar to what Akka allows.

"Nathan M. Swan"  wrote in message 
news:ladihiaieksszjodfbyn at forum.dlang.org...

On Wednesday, 21 March 2012 at 03:37:35 UTC, Nathan M. Swan wrote:
> After playing around with making a library with uses threads, I realized 
> it would be nice if there could be multiple inter-thread mailboxes than 
> just one per thread. That way, client code and third-party library code 
> don't interfere with each other.
>
> So this is my proposal: that std.concurrency is modified so that class 
> MessageBox is public and MessageBoxs be passed around through other 
> MessageBoxs, or perhaps another class is devised for this.
>
> I'm not sure of the implications of this, though I know I would find it 
> very useful by allowing me to write code without ("import 
> core."~someLowLevelModule)

After thinking about this more, this is my proposal for the API.
Backward compatibility is more important here than in other
places because it is documented in TDPL.

Each Tid contains a default MessageQueue accessible by property
messageQueue.

The send/receive functions and their variants operate on the
tid's default messageQueue.

The interface for class MessageQueue:

void send(T...)(T vals);
void prioritySend(T...)(T vals);
void receive(T...)(T ops);
receiveOnlyRet!(T) receiveOnly(T...)(T ops);
bool receiveTimeout(T...)(Duration duration, T ops);
@property void maxSize(size_t size);
@property void onCrowding(OnCrowding oc);
@property void onCrowding(bool function(MessageQueue) doThis);

Hopefully, this won't break any current code, and it will be easy
to implement.