Bug 6989 – Implement toString for std.concurrency.Tid

Currently calling write() on a Tid prints: Tid(std.concurrency.MessageBox) In earlier versions this used to be: Tid In either case, this isn't much information. I think it would be useful if toString was overloaded and returned a string with some sort of unique thread ID, e.g.: writeln(spawn(&test)); // Tid(0x0001) This could make it easier to debug some types of threading problems without having to use a debugger.

Hmm it looks like there isn't such a thing as a cross-platform thread-identifier (at least not in Druntime). Personally I like the idea of having named threads, where the name would be stored in a Tid. So you could do things like: spawn("workThread", &func, args); where the first pointer argument is the function. It might help with debugging, e.g. inspecting a Tid of a LinkTerminated exception could tell you which named thread threw the exception.

(In reply to comment #1) > Hmm it looks like there isn't such a thing as a cross-platform > thread-identifier (at least not in Druntime). Nevermind, there's actually m_addr, which is a uint on Windows and pthread_t on Posix (a pointer to _opaque_pthread_t). So I think core.thread.Thread should expose a getThreadID() function which returns m_addr, and then Tid can expose this function internally and also use it for toString().

*** Issue 13376 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

I think it's reasonable to add a Tid.id property that provides a unique name for a thread. I'd like to allow thread ids to be reused though. Then we could just use the MessageBox address. Providing a provably unique identifier to each thread across the entire run of the program would be expensive.

(In reply to Sean Kelly from comment #5) > Providing a provably unique > identifier to each thread across the entire run of the program would be > expensive. Isn't starting a thread expensive enough that incrementing a simple counter should be good enough to generate an ID?

Commit pushed to master at https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/commit/69d1348952c9fe56a1d567bfb54ab3138e76a5eb Merge pull request #2772 from quickfur/pr6989_rebase Rebase of PR 2482: Issue 6989 - create a better string representation of Tid

Commit pushed to 2.067 at https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/commit/69d1348952c9fe56a1d567bfb54ab3138e76a5eb Merge pull request #2772 from quickfur/pr6989_rebase