Re: Gnome/Gtk and thread safety

[Arnaud Masson <dev2 iodp com>]

>
>On Mon, 16 Oct 2000 09:19:59 Andy Tai wrote:
>>
>> Hi, gtk+ and Gnome libraries are generally not thread safe.  Support for
>> multithreaded programs (GUI calls can be in different threads) is almost
>> an absolute requirement for a modern software framework.  While GNOME's
>> main competitor, KDE/Qt, is not thread safe either, other GUI sytem
>> calls in OSes like BeOS and 32-bit Microsoft Windows are thread-safe.
>> Maybe the GNOME Project should require that newer GNOME software
>> foundation blocks like Bonobo and Orbit should be written with thread
>> safety in mind, and old stuff like gtk+ and gnome-libs should be
>> gradually made thread safe?

I have seen sample code in BeOS where you have to lock/unlock a window to
do simple operation on it... not very nice.

MS Windows has a thread-safe UI, but it is not really multithreaded since
each window belongs to only one thread. If you make call from other
threads, they are blocking.

Also Java Swing isn't T.S. too (unlike AWT).

OpenStep/YellowBox GUI isn't T.S.

I think there is no good reason to have several threads that handle user
interface. It's better to put the "engine" in working threads (network,
file IO, offscreen graphics computing...).