What would you do...

[Manu]

On 8 December 2011 00:20, Manu <turkeyman at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey peoples,
>
> So this might be a bit off topic... but I'm trying to think about the best
> way to write a small program in the most D-ish way possible (just to make
> sure I'm giving myself the most realistic experience with the language),
> and I wanted to get some thoughts.
> I don't know which way to go on this. I know what I'd do in various other
> languages, but I'm curious to hear the communities opinion. I think part of
> the problem is that D's networking libraries are pretty incomplete... but
> here it is anyway.
>
> I basically just want to write a trivial echo server which may have
> hundreds of thousands of connections split into small groups, and whenever
> data is received from a member in any group, it is basically echoed to the
> others in that group.
> Sounds super simple...
>
> My instinct is to have a listener on the main thread, and spawn a thread
> per group, each blocking on a select().. I think the questions is around
> thread safety and group management (managing the connection list for each
> group), and how to interrupt a blocking select() when a new connection has
> entered the group...
> "The D way" to solve these questions is a mystery to me. I just feel like
> I'm writing C code, manually managing thread safety, timeout logic. I feel
> like D offers some fundamental features that should make solving this
> problem a whole lot simpler that I must be completely missing...
>
> So, in a few sentences... simple problem, what would you do?
>

Nobody at all? :(

Quite seriously. I'm trying to work out how D's threading/thread safety
architecture can help me here.. Also since there's no collections, I'm
using the associative arrays. How do I manage thread safety when accessing
those? Is there a generic lock mechanism that I've missed along the way
without manually creating semaphores? Networking does seem to be pretty
bare, I'm basically writing C sockets code.
One of the results of my experiment here is to identify some critical
things that appear to be missing from the language. Places libraries should
really step in and make the task simple. This is a super simple network
app, but so far, it's just as complicated as if it were written in C.
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