• Manu (24/24) Dec 07 2011 Hey peoples,

Manu <turkeyman gmail.com> writes:

Hey peoples,

So this might be a bit off topic... but I'm trying to think about the best
way to write a small program in the most D-ish way possible (just to make
sure I'm giving myself the most realistic experience with the language),
and I wanted to get some thoughts.
I don't know which way to go on this. I know what I'd do in various other
languages, but I'm curious to hear the communities opinion. I think part of
the problem is that D's networking libraries are pretty incomplete... but
here it is anyway.

I basically just want to write a trivial echo server which may have
hundreds of thousands of connections split into small groups, and whenever
data is received from a member in any group, it is basically echoed to the
others in that group.
Sounds super simple...

My instinct is to have a listener on the main thread, and spawn a thread
per group, each blocking on a select().. I think the questions is around
thread safety and group management (managing the connection list for each
group), and how to interrupt a blocking select() when a new connection has
entered the group...
"The D way" to solve these questions is a mystery to me. I just feel like
I'm writing C code, manually managing thread safety, timeout logic. I feel
like D offers some fundamental features that should make solving this
problem a whole lot simpler that I must be completely missing...

So, in a few sentences... simple problem, what would you do?