TrieadJoin reference (C++)

TrieadJoin is the abstract base class that tells the harvester how to join a thread after it had finished. Obviously, it's present only in the C++ API and not in Perl (and by the way, the reference of the Perl classes in 2.0 has been completed, the remaining classes are only in C++).

Currently TrieadJoin has two subclasses: PerlTrieadJoin for the Perl threads and BasicPthread for the POSIX threads in C++. I won't be describing PerlTriedJoin, since it's in the internals of the Perl implementation, never intended to be directly used by the application developers, and if you're interested, you can always look at its source code. I'll describe BasicPthread later.

Well, actually there is not a whole lot of direct use for TrieadJoin either: you need to worry about it only if you want to define a joiner for some other kind of threads, and this is not very likely. But since I've started, I'll complete the write-up of it.

So, if you want to define a joiner for some other kind of  threads, you define a subclass of it, with an appropriately defined method join().

TrieadJoin is an Mtarget, naturally referenced from multiple threads (at the very least it's created in the thread to be joined or its parent, and then passed to the harvester thread by calling App::defineJoin()). The methods of TrieadJoin are:

TrieadJoin(const string &name);

The constrcutor. The name is the name of the Triead, used for the error messages. Due to the various syncronization reasons, this makes the life of the harvester much easier, than trying to look up the name from the Triead object.

virtual void join() = 0;

The Most Important joining method to be defined by the subclass. The subclass object must also hold the identity of the thread in it, to know which thread to join. The harvester will call this method.

virtual void interrupt();

The method that interrupts the target thread when it's requested to die. It's called in the context of the thread that triggers the App shutdown (or otherwise requests the target thread to die). By default the TrieadJoin carries a FileInterrupt object in it (it gets created on TrieadJoin construction, and then TrieadJoin keeps a reference to it), that will get called by this method to revoke the files. But everything else is a part of the threading system, and the base class doesn't know how to do it, the subclasses must define their own methods, wrapping the base class.

Both PerlTrieadJoin and BasicPthread add sending the signal SIGUSR2 to the target thread. For that they use the same target thread identity kept in the object as used by the join() call.

FileInterrupt *fileInterrupt() const;

Get a pointer to the FileInterrupt object defined in the TrieadJoin. The most typical use is to pass it to the TrieadOwner object, so that it can be easily found later:

to->fileInterrupt_ = fileInterrupt();

Though of course it could be kept in a separate local Autoref instead.

const string &getName() const;

Get back the name of the joiner's thread.