On Dec 8, 2011, at 6:00 AM, Manu wrote: > > Quite seriously. I'm trying to work out how D's threading/thread safety > architecture can help me here.. Also since there's no collections, I'm using > the associative arrays. How do I manage thread safety when accessing those? > Is there a generic lock mechanism that I've missed along the way without > manually creating semaphores? Networking does seem to be pretty bare, I'm > basically writing C sockets code.
That's really the issue more than threading. Socket programming support is rather weak in Phobos so any serious network programming falls back on C API calls. And typically you'll se some async IO method and not much in the way of threading. I've thought about integrating socket IO with the messaging system in std.concurrency, but there are issues with supporting both Windows (IOCP/proactor) and non-Windows (poll/reactor) systems as invisibly as possible. There are also weird issues that arise when ownership of sockets is passed between threads, which you'll find mention of if you look into socket programming in Erlang. Longer term what I'd like is to have a standalone networking API (std.net or whatever) plus a shim to integrate it with the messaging API for people who want this level of simplicity, but it's not something I'd want to force on people.
