[Glade-users] Animation

[tristan.van.berkom at gmail.com (Tristan Van Berkom)]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 3:04 PM, PEYMAN ASKARI <paskari007 at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> One thing I can't get my head around is how to set up a loop to run along
> side the event driven nature of GUIs.

You dont ! ... when in doubt, always call "return" :D

> For example, I have a simulator which simulates neurons. now I have files
> which implement all the neurons, and synapses, and updates them. When the
> user clicks 'next' it figures out which ones generate action potentials, and
> then the drawing area changes that neurons color from black to red. Pretty
> standard stuff
>
> But if the user clicks 'Play', then the simulator goes into a loop, and
> checks for action potentials continuously. The problem with this is that
> control is not returned to the GUI until the loop exits, and therefore the
> GUI is never updated it.
>
> Am I going to have to make my program multithreaded, or is there a way of
> having GTK call the function every 1 second for example.

g_timeout_add().

Cheers,
                       -Tristan

NOTE: in a time critical situation, you may be taking measures like:
   - implementing your time critical code in a thread
   - locking in memory on the said process.
   - telling the kernel that your time critical thread has a higher
     priority than the GUI...