On 11/15/12 1:08 AM, Manu wrote:
On 14 November 2012 19:54, Andrei Alexandrescu <seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org <mailto:seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org>> wrote: Yah, the whole point here is that we need something IN THE LANGUAGE DEFINITION about atomicLoad and atomicStore. NOT IN THE IMPLEMENTATION.THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. I won't outright disagree, but this seems VERY dangerous to me. You need to carefully study all popular architectures, and consider that if the language is made to depend on these primitives, and the architecture doesn't support it, or support that particular style of implementation (fairly likely), than D will become incompatible with a huge number of architectures on that day.
All contemporary languages that are serious about concurrency support atomic primitives one way or another. We must too. There's no two ways about it.
[snip]
Side note: I still think a convenient and fairly practical solution is to make 'shared' things 'lockable'; where you can lock()/unlock() them, and assignment to/from shared things is valid (no casting), but a runtime assert insists that the entity is locked whenever it is accessed.
This (IIUC) is conflating mutex-based synchronization with memory models and atomic operations. I suggest we postpone anything related to that for the sake of staying focused.
Andrei
