John Elliot writes: > I guess I meant 'strange' as in 'closed source, poorly > documented, "I didn't write it", etc.' (don't know much > about DirectX doco, so that's not a sledge as such).
The DirectX docs are actually fairly decent. > Say for example I'm targeting the managed DirectX API, and my > client code is multithreaded, and I do something horrible, > passing structs allocated on my stack by ref to a 'helper' > method that dereferences them and passes them by value to > the underlying API for execution on another thread. I'd still > be safe, because the dereferencing happened on my thread, > however if I passed them by ref to the other thread, then > by the time the second thread is executing my original > thread has changed state, and literally anything might be > on the stack. This can't happen. There is no way to retain a reference to a argument that is a pass-by-reference value type. No way at all. The worst that can happen is that two threads are banging on the same structure at the same time. No big deal -- it's just an application semantics bug. You most certainly CANNOT smash the stack (or read stack noise) using *verifiable* (safe) MSIL code. (According to the design, that is -- there may well be bugs that allow it, but bugs are by definition exceptions.) -- arlie =================================== This list is hosted by DevelopMentorŪ http://www.develop.com Some .NET courses you may be interested in: NEW! Guerrilla ASP.NET, 17 May 2004, in Los Angeles http://www.develop.com/courses/gaspdotnetls View archives and manage your subscription(s) at http://discuss.develop.com
