I am not a systems programmer, meaning I do not write operating system device drivers or file systems or operating system modules, etc, all written in a language that will compile down to raw machine code. I write in C# primarily which is arguably an applications programming language, running in the much loved .NET Common Language Runtime.
The vast majority of systems programming is done in C and C++. And for some reason, C++ has always been a daunting mess of libraries, odd syntax and pointer and memory allocation madness to me. Even setting up an environment to get the right build libraries, the right compiler and linker, etc., have always led me to fits of impatience. And for that reason and many others, I have stuck to C# and applications development.
But every once in a while, I look in on systems programming to see if anyone has really solved the problems I love to hate with respect to C and C++. And for a few years I’ve read a little about the D programming language here and there. A week ago, over the weekend, I decided to give it a try and really see what I could learn.
I have to say, I have been impressed. The D programming language offers a few things that I would dearly love to see in C#.
1. Exception Safety – the scope keyword
void abc()
{
auto resource = getresource(); // acquire some resource
scope(exit) resource.close(); // close the resource
doSomeProcessing(); // do processing
}
As C# programmers, we’re used to the try..catch..finally blocks. And we clean up a resource in the finally block. The trouble with that is many lines of code can end up separating your resource acquisition code from your resource cleanup code. Yes, with vigilance and well written tests, this is okay. But wouldn’t it be cool to be able to tell the compiler, “Hey, when I’m done with this thing I just now created, clean it up for me, no matter what code comes after this in this method.” I would love to see the scope keyword added to C#.
2. Concurrency approach
int perThread;
shared int PerProcess;
In C#, when you declare a class level variable, it is automatically shared between threads. You can use the [ThreadStatic] attribute to get a per thread instance of a given value or object. But it then has to be static. With the D programming language, you get thread safety in class variables. To override that safety, you have to explicitly tell the compiler you want the value shared. While I’m not advocating a change to C# in this regard, I would love to have a way to assure that a variable cannot be modified across thread boundaries.
3. Message based threads
import std.concurrency, std.stdio;
void main() {
auto low = 0, high = 100;
auto tid = spawn(&writer);
foreach (i; low .. high) {
writeln("Main thread: ", i);
tid.send(thisTid, i);
enforce(receiveOnly!Tid() == tid);
}
}
void writer() {
for (;;) {
auto msg = receiveOnly!(Tid, int)();
writeln("Secondary thread: ", msg[1]);
msg[0].send(thisTid);
}
}
For me, this is perhaps the coolest part of the D programming language’s base class library which they call Phobos. Note that main spawns a thread calling writer. The loop in main then sends a message to writer and the loop in writer receives the messages and operates on them and then sends a message back to the original thread.
You can learn a lot about D on www.dlang.org and read more about D concurrency on Informit. And if you want to play with D in Visual Studio, hop on over to see VisualD on dsource.org.