Channels for tasks?

[Sean Kelly]

On Jul 19, 2013, at 12:48 AM, deadalnix <deadalnix at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, 18 July 2013 at 19:08:25 UTC, Sean Kelly wrote:
>> Functionally, fibers are coroutines.  They have their own stack and execute within the context of the calling thread.  Most languages that scale to thousands or millions of concurrent threads/processes use fibers (often called "green threads" in this context) to pull it off.  The obstacle for D is that global data is thread-local by default, so if we were to use fibers in the back-end to allow the creation of a large number of "threads", fibers would basically need their own TLS to avoid breaking code.  We already do in-library TLS for OSX and so it shouldn't be terribly difficult to use this logic for fibers, but things get tricky once you consider dynamic libraries.  It really should happen at some point though, for std.concurrency to operate at its full potential.
> 
> My take is that we should keep fibers as they are. But change Thread (as the class in the runtime) to be Fibers with FLS and then let the runtime operate system thread and schedule Thread on them.

I think this would most likely happen within std.concurrency, with the context switch occurring on send/receive.