Re: using threads with GTK+

[Russell Shaw <rjshaw iprimus com au>]

Paul Pogonyshev wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I'm going to use the following threads with GTK+:
>   - thread 1 does all GUI job (widgets etc.) and launches more threads
>     when needed;
>   - threads 2, ... (launched by 1) do some time consuming computations
>     and inform thread 1 once they are done so it can present the results
>     to user.
>
> The only thing i'm not sure how to implement is how to let thread 1 know
> when one of working threads is finished.  Current best way i found while
> studying GTK+ and Glib manuals is like this:
>
> Thread 1 uses a new event source in its the main loop which pops events
> from a GAsyncQueue.  Once a working thread finishes it jobs, it pushes a
> structure onto the queue, calls g_main_context_wakeup() to wake thread 1
> up if needed, and terminates.
>
> This does not seem to be very hard to implement, but before starting on
> it, i would like to be sure i didn't miss some more simple way of
> implementing the schema above.

Thread 1 can simply retrieve events from a g_async_queue with
g_async_queue_pop() or g_async_queue_timed_pop(). The finishing
threads just push an apropriate message onto the queue with
g_async_queue_push().