On 8 February 2012 00:33, Sean Kelly <sean@invisibleduck.org> wrote:

On Feb 6, 2012, at 1:38 PM, Oliver Puerto wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'm very new to D. Just started reading "The D programming language". I should read it from beginning to end before posting questions here. I know ... But I'm just too impatient. The issue seems not to be that simple, nevertheless. The code below compiles with Visual Studio.
>
> I want to have something like my actor class that I can start running in it's own thread like in Scala or other languages that support actors. So at best, I would like to do something like this:
>
> MyActor myActor = new MyActor();
> auto tid = spawn(&start, &myActor.run());

This should work:

void runActor(shared MyActor a) { (cast(MyActor)a)).run(); }

MyActor myActor = new MyActor();

auto tid = spawn(cast(shared MyActor) myActor, &runActor);

See, my conclusion is, whenever using this API, you inevitably have dog ugly code. That code is barely readable through the casts... I can only draw this up to faulty API design.

I understand the premise of 'shared'-ness that the API is trying to assert/guarantee, but the concept is basically broken in the language. You can't use this API at all with out these blind casts, which is, basically, a hack, and I am yet to see an example of using this API 'properly'. The casts are totally self defeating.

std.concurrency really should allow unique references to a non-shared type to be passed as well, using something similar to assumeUnique.