Safe & Performant Inter-Thread Message Passing

[John Colvin]

On Tuesday, 18 February 2014 at 21:05:38 UTC, Nordlöw wrote:
> What's the best solution to communicate between threads in D 
> today if I care about
>
> 1. Security & Correctness?
> 2. Performance?
>
> and are these mutually exclusive?
>
> Does Phobos or other library contain lockfree queues?
>
> From what I can see std.concurrent.MessageBox requires 
> Mutex-locking. Is this really needed or can it be enhanced to 
> support lockfree communication similar to what Boost.Lockfree 
> does?

Performance and inter-thread communication is heavily dependant 
on the use-case, including the details of memory access patterns 
etc. (cache misses can hurt you more than lock overheads ever 
will)

Most benchmarks that show amazing lock-free performance scaling 
deal with pathological cases. A lot of real-world code can be 
plenty fast (or even faster) with message-passing or (sometimes 
even) locks.


Security and correctness: message passing wins here, no question. 
Data is copied between threads, no possibility of races etc. I 
really like std.concurrency for this: very intuitive, easy to use 
and pretty fast.