On Tuesday, 12 February 2013 at 15:26:18 UTC, FG wrote:
On 2013-02-12 14:47, monarch_dodra wrote:
Does anybody have any preliminary feedback, objections,
remarks?
You will encounter a possible problem on main thread
termination.
Normally it's done automatically in static ~this(): a linkDead
message is sent to all spawned threads listed in "links" and
then close() is called on the mbox. Those linkDead messages
have thisTid as sender and that's a problem, because with
custom mailbox thisTid != ownerTid, so the child won't treat
that message as OwnerTerminated. It's caused by "links" being
global and populated by spawn(). And if you make your own
spawn, that doesn't touch links, the child won't be informed
about parent's sudden death. How do you work around that?
That's a good point. For starters, I'd call "myTid.spawn(...)" so
as to set the correct "owner" for the spwaned thread. This is
especially relevant what with the new global "ownerTid" that
should get introduced in 2.062
The real question though (IMO) is rather: Why isn't "links" a
member field of the MessageBox itself?
By placing it inside MessageBox, it changes *nothing* for "static
~this()".
As for user generated MessageBoxes, the message will be sent when
the MessageBox itself is finalized.
The only problem with this approach is that there might be a
delay between when the last reference to the MessageBox is
destroyed, and the finalizer actually kicks in. Not entirely sure
this is a huge problem though, since we *are* dealing with
threads after all.
Also, just the same way a File can be closed either explicitly or
implicitly, we can give Tid a "die" member to explicitly notify
an incoming death.
I'll put more thought into it anyways.
