Re: [gtk-list] gtk and LinuxThreads

[Owen Taylor <owt1 cornell edu>]

Here's something I said a couple of months ago about the issue. I
think it's still reasonably correct, though I'm not much of an expert
in an area. (I haven't even looked at how other libraries handle thread
safety). I just installed glibc-2.0 with LinuxThreads the other day,
so maybe I'll look at it sometime. Maybe.

Regards,
                                      Owen

[ question was asked about whether gtk was thread safe, I responded: ]

> It's an interesting question. I think the simple answer is no, gtk
> is nowhere close to thread safe. Putting a big lock around the whole
> library would be pretty damn tedious since gtk/gdk has approximately
> 780 entry points. If you were willing to guarantee that two threads
> would never access widgets under the same toplevel, it wouldn't be too
> hard to lock the global data correctly (I think). If you just ensured
> that two threads never accessed the same widget, you'd have to do some
> hacking on the resizing code (which is pretty complicated), but its
> probably a doable project.

> On the other hand, in your case I would just confine all the code
> that interacts with gtk to a single thread. Have the computational
> thread write its data into a buffer and set a flag, and have
> the interface thread check the flag in a timeout and redraw when
> necessary.