The previous implementation was very likely to cause panics during
unwinding through this process:
- child panics, drops its receiver
- taskpool comes back around and sends another job over to that child
- the child receiver has hung up, so the taskpool panics on send
- during unwinding, the taskpool attempts to send a quit message to
the child, causing a panic during unwinding
- panic during unwinding causes a process abort
This meant that TaskPool upgraded any child panic to a full process
abort. This came up in Iron when it caused crashes in long-running
servers.
This implementation uses a single channel to communicate between
spawned tasks and the TaskPool, which significantly reduces the complexity
of the implementation and cuts down on allocation. The TaskPool uses
the channel as a single-producer-multiple-consumer queue.
Additionally, through the use of send_opt and recv_opt instead of
send and recv, this TaskPool is robust on the face of child panics,
both before, during, and after the TaskPool itself is dropped.
Due to the TaskPool no longer using an `init_fn_factory`, this is a
[breaking-change]
otherwise, the API has not changed.
If you used `init_fn_factory` in your code, and this change breaks for
you, you can instead use an `AtomicUint` counter and a channel to
move information into child tasks.
https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/221
The current terminology of "task failure" often causes problems when
writing or speaking about code. You often want to talk about the
possibility of an operation that returns a Result "failing", but cannot
because of the ambiguity with task failure. Instead, you have to speak
of "the failing case" or "when the operation does not succeed" or other
circumlocutions.
Likewise, we use a "Failure" header in rustdoc to describe when
operations may fail the task, but it would often be helpful to separate
out a section describing the "Err-producing" case.
We have been steadily moving away from task failure and toward Result as
an error-handling mechanism, so we should optimize our terminology
accordingly: Result-producing functions should be easy to describe.
To update your code, rename any call to `fail!` to `panic!` instead.
Assuming you have not created your own macro named `panic!`, this
will work on UNIX based systems:
grep -lZR 'fail!' . | xargs -0 -l sed -i -e 's/fail!/panic!/g'
You can of course also do this by hand.
[breaking-change]
This breaks a fair amount of code. The typical patterns are:
* `for _ in range(0, 10)`: change to `for _ in range(0u, 10)`;
* `println!("{}", 3)`: change to `println!("{}", 3i)`;
* `[1, 2, 3].len()`: change to `[1i, 2, 3].len()`.
RFC #30. Closes#6023.
[breaking-change]
The struct and module doc comments are reformulated. The `execute`
method's documentation are put up to date, and failure information
is added. A test is also added to address the possible failure.
This commit is the final step in the libstd facade, #13851. The purpose of this
commit is to move libsync underneath the standard library, behind the facade.
This will allow core primitives like channels, queues, and atomics to all live
in the same location.
There were a few notable changes and a few breaking changes as part of this
movement:
* The `Vec` and `String` types are reexported at the top level of libcollections
* The `unreachable!()` macro was copied to libcore
* The `std::rt::thread` module was moved to librustrt, but it is still
reexported at the same location.
* The `std::comm` module was moved to libsync
* The `sync::comm` module was moved under `sync::comm`, and renamed to `duplex`.
It is now a private module with types/functions being reexported under
`sync::comm`. This is a breaking change for any existing users of duplex
streams.
* All concurrent queues/deques were moved directly under libsync. They are also
all marked with #![experimental] for now if they are public.
* The `task_pool` and `future` modules no longer live in libsync, but rather
live under `std::sync`. They will forever live at this location, but they may
move to libsync if the `std::task` module moves as well.
[breaking-change]
