On Thursday, 15 October 2015 at 10:11:06 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
On 10/13/15 10:05 PM, Dicebot wrote:
On Tuesday, 13 October 2015 at 18:28:23 UTC, Marco Leise wrote:
Guys, sorry to break into your wishful thinking, but
synchronized(mutex) {}
already works as you want it to since as long as I can think.
Yes, it
takes a parameter, yes it calls lock/unlock on the mutex. :)
Yes, and I am saying that it doesn't justify presence of
`synchronized`
keyword in the language at all, being historical legacy
misfeature.
For a while we were of the opinion that we should let
"synchronized" and "shared" be and move on with alternative
features. Now we believe an incomplete language definition is
damaging the language as a whole so we better make them fully
defined and useful within their charter.
Lock-based synchronization has plenty of good uses and the
scope locking defined by "synchronized" covers a large useful
subset of it. We need to make it usable safely and without
contortions, and this particular PR is a step along that way.
It's not a huge priority but since Andrej has only done the
work, the main concern left is breakage of existing code,
albeit much of that is incorrect or unnecessarily unsafe.
Unless we're going to decide to get rid of synchronized in favor
of just using mutexes and guards/autolocks like you would in C++,
I think that it's pretty clear that this change is an
improvement. And it's what TDPL has said for something like 5
years now. So, in theory, it's publicly been the plan for some
time.
- Jonathan M Davis
