Re: Event loop processing in threads that must block

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Luciano Chavez <lnx1138 us ibm com> writes: 
> I apologize for the lack of clarity. Maybe I should ask simply, can I
> execute gtk_main () on two separate threads or can there only be one
> thread executing the gtk_main () event loop? I am not talking about
> nested gtk_main () calls but independent threads calling gtk_main
> (). 

Ah, no, you can't do that in GTK 1.2 I don't think. GTK 2.0 gives you
more flexibility (using the GLib-level main loop API).
 
A typical trick is to somehow get your UI action to happen in the main
thread, e.g. by queuing an idle function. Then you could block the
other thread (pthread_cond_wait?) and wake it up when gtk_main()
returns in the main thread.

> Also, can you nest gdk_thread_enter/leave calls? Do they keep reference
> counts so that the last leave does releases the gdk mutex?

No, they aren't recursive.

Havoc