Concurrency

The concurrency model in V was heavily inspired by Go. An important difference at the moment is the fact that there are no coroutines in V, so any functions run in a separate system thread, which reduces flexibility.

Coroutines are planned, but they are not implemented at the moment.

Spawning Concurrent Tasks

To run a function on a separate thread, use the spawn keyword:

import math fn do_smth(a f64, b f64) { // ordinary function without return value c := math.sqrt(a * a + b * b) println(c) } fn main() { // do_smth will be run in a separate thread spawn do_smth(3, 4) }

You can also use anonymous functions:

import math fn main() { spawn fn (a f64, b f64) { c := math.sqrt(a * a + b * b) println(c) }(3, 4) }

V also has the go keyword, it is reserved for coroutines, currently it works the same as spawn and will be automatically changed to spawn when formatted with vfmt.

Waiting for a function to finish

To wait for the completion of a function running in a separate thread, the result of the spawn expression can be assigned to a variable that will act as handle. This handle can be used to wait for the function to complete by calling the wait() method:

import math fn do_smth(a f64, b f64) { c := math.sqrt(a * a + b * b) println(c) } fn main() { h := spawn do_smth(3, 4) // do_smth() runs in parallel thread h.wait() // do_smth() has definitely finished }

Using this approach, you can also get the return value from a function running on a separate thread.

This will not require changing the signature of the function itself.

import math fn get_hypot(a f64, b f64) f64 { // ordinary function returning a value return math.sqrt(a * a + b * b) } fn main() { handle := spawn get_hypot(54.06, 2.08) // spawn thread and get handle to it h1 := get_hypot(2.32, 16.74) // do some other calculation here h2 := handle.wait() // get result from spawned thread println('Results: ${h1}, ${h2}') // Results: 16.9, 54.1 }

Threads array

If there is a large number of tasks, it might be easier to manage them using an array of threads:

import time fn task(id int, duration int) { println('task ${id} begin') time.sleep(duration * time.millisecond) println('task ${id} end') } fn main() { mut threads := []thread{} threads << spawn task(1, 500) threads << spawn task(2, 900) threads << spawn task(3, 100) threads.wait() println('done') } // task 1 begin // task 2 begin // task 3 begin // task 3 end // task 1 end // task 2 end // done

Additionally, for threads that return the same type, calling wait() on the thread array will return all computed values.

fn expensive_computing(i int) int { return i * i } fn main() { mut threads := []thread int{} for i in 1 .. 5 { threads << spawn expensive_computing(i) } // Join all tasks r := threads.wait() println('All jobs finished: ${r}') // All jobs finished: [1, 4, 9, 16] }

Spawning Threads in main()

Consider the following code:

fn watcher() { for { println('started') break } } fn main() { spawn watcher() }

Here we are running the watcher() function in a separate thread, however the problem is that main() will finish before watcher() has started, so the program will exit even though watcher() has not finished yet.

To avoid this, use the wait() described in the previous section:

fn watcher() { for { println('started') break } } fn main() { h := spawn watcher() h.wait() }

Change Stack Size

To change the stack size of a thread, use the spawn_stack attribute:

// 64KB stack size [spawn_stack: 65536] fn watcher() { println('hello') }

Thread Communication

V uses channels to communicate between threads, they will be discussed in the next article.

On this page
Copyright © 2023   V Open Source Community Association (VOSCA)