Hi Jim, On Mon, 2010-03-29 at 18:30 -0700, Jim Nelson wrote: > In Vala, I can lock a null reference. Is this by design or a side-effect?
It's by design (constrained by GObject). Unlike in C#/.NET, we don't have a monitor available in every object. Due to this constraint, we've decided to use different lock statement semantics compared to C#. The only other option would have been to not support lock statements at all . In Vala lock(foo) locks the field `foo' and not the instance where `foo` points to. This means that the current value of the field is completely irrelevant, and locking a field whose value happens to be null is perfectly fine. > I think this is fine and should be the documented behavior. Because Vala > only allows locking member variables (and not "this"), being unable to lock > a nulled reference would require allocating a dummy object to lock against > or explicitly using a Mutex and forgoing lock(). I find both unappealing. Yes, it's unfortunate that we can't properly support lock(this) as GObject doesn't support it and we can't just add a mutex field to instance structs as this would result in issues when using lock(this) in subclasses. Otherwise, I'd probably recommend using lock(this) in most cases. Jürg _______________________________________________ Vala-list mailing list Vala-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list