Fibers are a way to implemented concurrency
in a cooperative fashion. The class Fiber
is defined in the module core.thread
.
The basic idea is that when a fiber
has nothing to do or waits for more input, it
actively gives away its possibility to
execute instructions by calling Fiber.yield()
.
The parent context gains control again but the
fiber's state - all variables on the stack - are
saved. The fiber can then be resumed
and will continue at the instruction right after
it called Fiber.yield()
. Magic? Yes.
void foo() {
writeln("Hello");
Fiber.yield();
writeln("World");
}
// ...
auto f = new Fiber(&foo);
f.call(); // Prints Hello
f.call(); // Prints World
This feature can be used to implement concurrency where multiple fibers cooperatively share a single core. The advantage of fibers compared to threads is that their resource usage is lower because no context switching is involved.
A very good usage of this technique can be seen in the vibe.d framework which implements non-blocking (or asynchronous) I/O operations in terms of fibers leading to much cleaner code.