On 2013-11-22 23:14:44 +0000, Chris Williams said:
On Friday, 22 November 2013 at 22:35:47 UTC, Shammah Chancellor wrote:
On 2013-11-22 22:34:19 +0000, Shammah Chancellor said:
Edit, I see that you have receiveAll.. I didn't notice that. However,
that still doesn't satisfy the problem when you want to do receive()
for your Tid, and receiveAll() from your channels.
receiveAll() could pull from the thread's personal message box as well
as all of its subscribed channels, so that it truly was a "receive ALL".
My thoughts for reasons to avoid that, however, are:
1. Threads always have their own message box allocated - even if it's
empty - whereas with channels, at most you only have as many message
boxes as you subscribed to. So my thinking was that if people are
unlikely to mix channels-based systems and direct-sends in the same
application, then every call to receiveAll() is having to spend an
extra cycle checking the direct-send message box.
2. Since a Channel is just an interface, the implementation of which
can vary, anyone who wanted to implement a NetworkedDuplicateChannel()
class would be able to do so and pass it into a module that only
includes std.concurency. This allows the actual implementation of any
given channel to behave completely different from one another and
quickly port code from one type to the other. send()/receive() are just
innate to threads, however, and can't be replaced except by changing
the import in each file to something else. Knowing that and also
knowing that any direct-messaging system would probably be built like a
channel (so that it had a constructor/init function where an IP and
port could be configured, and perhaps an explicit startListening()
method to call), I don't see anyone trying to override send()/receive()
as their method for receiving direct messages over the network. They
would still use the Channel interface, so there's not much value in
trying to tie the two together.
I am suggesting you define a particular type of message to be received,
and then send that to the Thread/Fiber's MessageQueue. Then the
Channel is just an interface to broadcast messages to all the
subscribers of a particular channel. Then each thread need only poll
one queue.
