Re: Discouraging use of sync APIs

[Ross Lagerwall <rosslagerwall gmail com>]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 2:46 PM, Ray Strode <halfline gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 7:17 AM, Philip Withnall <philip tecnocode co uk> wrote:
> > It might turn out that runtime checks are just not feasible, but in that
> > case I think we still need some way of solving the original problem:
> > that people are using sync calls and blocking up the main loop.
> I'm all for discouraging sync use in the main thread after the
> application is up, but
> are stalled applications actually a wide spread problem? I don't
> really remember any
> apps I use regularly locking up (except for maybe hexchat when connecting to my
> irc proxy).  Granted, it's harder to notice these days now that we
> have a compositor
> and applications don't need to redraw after getting uncovered, so it
> could be it's
> happening more than is obvious.  But, I just wonder if we really need
> to do anything.
> It seems like the bad/obvious cases would get bug reports and fixes
> pretty quickly,
> and so the problem should regulate itself.

There are quite often gvfs or Nautilus bug reports that say "network mount
causes desktop to slow down". I tracked it down to some gnome-shell
extension which somehow does sync calls to the remote fs which makes
everything crawl.

In general though I think severe warnings on the documentation for each sync
call is better than runtime warnings or compile-time warnings.

Ross