On Tuesday, 13 October 2015 at 07:17:20 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
Ultimately, I think that we're better off with TDPL's
definition of synchronized classes than the synchronized
functions that we have now, so I do think that the change
should be made. However, I also think that synchronized classes
as TDPL describes are limited enough to be of questionable
usefulness. Stripping off the outer layer of shared is unlikely
to be sufficient in all but basic cases (and synchronized
classes can't do any better than that, I don't think), meaning
that you're likely going to have to cast away shared to do much
with shared anyway, in which case, having a synchronized class
loses at least some of its value. It can still encapsulate
shared (which is good), but it doesn't necessarily make it much
easier or safer to use.
- Jonathan M Davis
I have to agree here. I think synchronized classes are of very
little use, especially because they don't "cast away" shared in a
useful way. It still has to be done manually. I think we should
remove them. Synchronized methods should also be removed in my
eyes. Making each and every object bigger by one pointer just for
the sake of a few synchronized methods doesn't seem to be a good
trade off to me. The entire synchronized methods give the user
the feeling that he simply slaps synchronized on his class /
method and then its thread safe and he doesn't have to care about
threads anymore. In the real world this is far from true however.
So synchronized methods and classes just give a false sense of
thread safety and should rather be removed.
