Re: using shared effectively in a producer/consumer situation.

[Kevin Balbas via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Sunday, 23 April 2017 at 20:30:33 UTC, Kevin Balbas wrote:
I have an application where a long-lived "loader" thread takes 
messages to load data, loads that data, and then sends it back 
to the main thread via the standard concurrency primitives.  
Something like this:

void threadFunc(Tid ownerTid)
{
    while(true)
    {
        receive(
            (int id, string path) { LoadThingByPath(ownerTid, 
id, path); }
        );
    }
}

void LoadThingByPath(Tid ownerTid, int id, string path)
{
    ret thing = MakeThing(path)
    send(ownerTid, id, thing);
}



I know I need to make thing shared, but I don't know how do it 
properly in this context.  Casting to shared in send() works, 
but then I have to accept a shared Thing on the other side, 
process it as a shared Thing, etc.  cast(Thing) doesn't appear 
to cast away the shared qualifier either.  Does that mean ALL 
of the loaded data in my application needs to be shared all the 
time?  Is there not simply a way to transfer ownership?

And after two hours of fiddling with this in a simple project I 
notice a bug that kept me from casting away shared.  Please 
disregard that part.

I guess the follow up here is:  Is this the correct way to do it? 
 cast to shared, send to main thread, cast away shared?