On 7/9/14, 8:59 PM, logicchains wrote:
On Thursday, 10 July 2014 at 02:12:18 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
Rob Pike has said multiple times that the key/unique thing about Go is
"select" and that goroutines are the easy part. I'm not entirely sure
I grok what he means but we should if we're going to try and do what
they got right.
Select is vital for Go in the sense that without it there'd be no way to
do non-blocking send/receives on channels in Go. It's much more concise
than the alternative, which would be something like `if chanA is empty
then foo(chanA) else if chanB is empty then bar(chanB)`. It also avoids
starvation by checking the channels in a random order - unlike the
previous if-else chain, which would never call bar(chanB) if chanA was
always empty.
That's what I think as well.
It's been implemented in Rust[1] via a macro, and can be implemented in
Haskell[2] without compiler support, so I'd be surprised if it wasn't
already possible to implement in D. It wouldn't however be as useful as
Go's until D gets message passing between fibres.
Yah.
Actually, an important question that should be considered: does D want
actor-style concurrency, like Erlang and Akka, or CSP-style concurrency,
like Rust, Go and Haskell? Or both? Deciding this would allow efforts to
be more focused.
We already have actor-style via std.concurrency. We also have fork-join
parallelism via std.parallel. What we need is a library for CSP.
Andrei
