Possible to pass a member function to spawn?

[Manu]

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?
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