I'm building a program which I intend to have many threads that can each send messages to (and receive messages from) each other. The obvious way to do this would be to have a shared array of Tids, but this seems to not work. I'm continually fighting the system to get it to compile, and this makes me think it should probably be done some other way...but what?
One possibility is to have each thread maintain a separate array that contains all the threads, which would mean that they would need to be initialized after they were created. This would avoid the problems of shared Tids, but each Tid contains a private mailbox, so this would be being duplicated, and that bothers me...it seems like a poor idea. (Maybe I'm wrong about that...but I don't know.) I do know that I want a n by n communication matrix (leaving out the main thread), with each thread sending messages to all to others. (Well, except for a few that I haven't really defined yet, but which handle separated functions.) My plan was to have each thread run an execution loop which frequently checked for messages received in between performing its own functions. They are not intended to synchronize with each other. They are not intended to be temporary, i.e., each of these threads would be started shortly after program initialization, and continue running until program termination. But how should I get them to know each other's address? I don't want the main thread to need to act as a switchboard between all the others, though I guess that would "sort of" work. (Actually, if I need to do that, that job would be pulled off into yet another thread...and I end up with more threads than processors. Still, that's a design that is possible, IIUC.) Any comments or suggestions?