On Wed, 30 Apr 2014 13:26:40 -0700 Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 4/30/14, 10:50 AM, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote: > > There > > is nothing whatsoever in the language which guarantees that running > > them in parallel will work or even makes sense. > > Default thread-local globals? -- Andrei Sure, that helps, but it's trivial to write a unittest block which depends on a previous unittest block, and as soon as a unittest block uses an external resource such as a socket or file, then even if a unittest block doesn't directly depend on the end state of a previous unittest block, it still depends on external state which could be affected by other unittest blocks. So, ultimately, the language really doesn't ensure that running a unittest block can be parallelized. If it's pure as bearophile suggested, then it can be done, but as long as a unittest block is impure, then it can rely on global state - even inadvertently - (be it state directly in the program or state outside the program) and therefore not work when pararellized. So, I suppose that you could parallelize unittest blocks if they were marked as pure (though I'm not sure if that's currently a legal thing to do), but impure unittest blocks aren't guaranteed to be parallelizable. I'm all for making it possible to parallelize unittest block execution, but as it stands, doing so automatically would be a bad idea. We could make it so that a unittest block could be marked as parallelizable, or we could even move towards making parallelizable the default and require that a unittest block be marked as unparallelizable, but we'd have to be very careful with that, as it will break code if we're not careful about how we do that transition. I'm inclined to think that marking unittest blocks as pure to parallelize them is a good idea, because then the unittest blocks that are guaranteed to be parallelizable are run in parallel, whereas those that aren't wouldn't be. The primary dowside would be that the cases where the programmer knew that they could be parallelized but they weren't pure, since those unittest blocks wouldn't be parallelized. - Jonathan M Davis
