Hello,

I'm having some problems wrapping my head around shared classes and whatnot.
So my application has a Logger class, which basically just writes formatted messages to a target, of which debugGLLogger inherits. What debugGLLogger does is simple in theory: it supplies a callback function to OpenGL, and said callback function uses a logger to write debug messages coming from OpenGL to.

First off, I can't control the fact that it's a callback function, or when it is called, as this is done by the driver, windowing system, and so on.

Hence, to know which logger I need to write to, I used a static variable which gets set to my main logger for OpenGL.

In theory, this should work, as I'm currently (or so I thought) not using concurrency, which means that the static variable should exist in all cases.

However, apparently the callback function is possibly called from a different thread which I have no control over, as I've had to painfully discover. My mainLogger static variable is useless, and everything falls apart. I'm not sure where this thread comes from, and maybe I'm just imagining things, but since I see no other way the variable could suddenly become null, I'm guessing that's the issue.

So in some way I've got to bring the "shared" keyword into play, so I have a reference to a logger instance which I can use across threads. However, apparently for that, the class also needs to be shared, and I'm not sure if that's even the "right" way to do things.

I've also thought that maybe I should utilise a seperate thread to run all loggers in, and communicate with the loggers through message-passing.

I'm not an experienced programmer, so I'd love to hear some advice on how I could solve this.

On Fri, 31 Jan 2014 13:48:07 +0000, Nicolas F. wrote:

> However, apparently the callback function is possibly called from a different thread which I have no control over, as I've had to painfully discover. My mainLogger static variable is useless, and everything falls apart. I'm not sure where this thread comes from, and maybe I'm just imagining things, but since I see no other way the variable could suddenly become null, I'm guessing that's the issue.
> 

Are you using a lib like GLFW or GLW?  A lot of these libraries create threads for you. That maybe where this thread is coming from.

When you set this call back are you able to supply user data with it? Good callback API's should do this.  If so you can supply a logger instance pointer that way.

You could also use a global logger factor/manager.  Checkout std.idioms [https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/1294/files]

-Byron

On Friday, 31 January 2014 at 13:48:09 UTC, Nicolas F. wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm having some problems wrapping my head around shared classes and whatnot.
> So my application has a Logger class, which basically just writes formatted messages to a target, of which debugGLLogger inherits. What debugGLLogger does is simple in theory: it supplies a callback function to OpenGL, and said callback function uses a logger to write debug messages coming from OpenGL to.
>

Looks like you want to route OpenGL logging to your own logger, you can look here for the very same thing: https://github.com/p0nce/gfm/blob/master/opengl/gfm/opengl/opengl.d#L417

On Friday, 31 January 2014 at 13:48:09 UTC, Nicolas F. wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm having some problems wrapping my head around shared classes and whatnot.
> So my application has a Logger class, which basically just writes formatted messages to a target, of which debugGLLogger inherits. What debugGLLogger does is simple in theory: it supplies a callback function to OpenGL, and said callback function uses a logger to write debug messages coming from OpenGL to.
>
> First off, I can't control the fact that it's a callback function, or when it is called, as this is done by the driver, windowing system, and so on.
>
> Hence, to know which logger I need to write to, I used a static variable which gets set to my main logger for OpenGL.
>
> In theory, this should work, as I'm currently (or so I thought) not using concurrency, which means that the static variable should exist in all cases.
>
> However, apparently the callback function is possibly called from a different thread which I have no control over, as I've had to painfully discover. My mainLogger static variable is useless, and everything falls apart. I'm not sure where this thread comes from, and maybe I'm just imagining things, but since I see no other way the variable could suddenly become null, I'm guessing that's the issue.
>
> So in some way I've got to bring the "shared" keyword into play, so I have a reference to a logger instance which I can use across threads. However, apparently for that, the class also needs to be shared, and I'm not sure if that's even the "right" way to do things.
>
> I've also thought that maybe I should utilise a seperate thread to run all loggers in, and communicate with the loggers through message-passing.
>
> I'm not an experienced programmer, so I'd love to hear some advice on how I could solve this.

You could always use __gshared instead of shared. Then it becomes a global static variable and you don't have to deal with the current shared mess. It comes with the canveat that it's not safe. (as in not data-race safe)

On Saturday, 1 February 2014 at 21:23:38 UTC, ponce wrote:
> On Friday, 31 January 2014 at 13:48:09 UTC, Nicolas F. wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'm having some problems wrapping my head around shared classes and whatnot.
>> So my application has a Logger class, which basically just writes formatted messages to a target, of which debugGLLogger inherits. What debugGLLogger does is simple in theory: it supplies a callback function to OpenGL, and said callback function uses a logger to write debug messages coming from OpenGL to.
>>
>
> Looks like you want to route OpenGL logging to your own logger, you can look here for the very same thing: https://github.com/p0nce/gfm/blob/master/opengl/gfm/opengl/opengl.d#L417

I tried this before and wasn't successful (got a weird crash), but I just tried again and this time around it works well. I must've messed up a cast somewhere.
Thanks, this resolved my issue!