Re: [gtk-list] Re: Integrating guile-gtk with other event loops

[Kenneth Albanowski <kjahds kjahds com>]

On 4 Aug 1998, Sascha Ziemann wrote:

> Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com> writes:
> 
> |   I am trying to figure out a way to integrate guile-gtk's event loop
> |   with another event loop, specifically that of scwm.
> | 
> | In general I believe it is broken for a library to demand that it own
> | the select loop.   A solution to this might be to create for each
> | library that can do so a function
> | 
> |   gtk_get_select_fds(...)
> | 
> |   gtk_select_result(...)
> 
> A thread safe Gtk+ would make this superfluous. 

I don't see how. Certainly a premptively multi-threaded environment can
meet some of the same need as a select() loop, but mere thread safety
doesn't accomplish this.

> Similar problem come up with multimedia or networking programs. With the
> above approach you have to "route" all events through one bottleneck.

A bottleneck that is extremely common, and required for interoperation
with existing UNIX libraries and current practice.

To respond to the original question, perhaps some sort of standard C
library could be devised for letting libraries share event loops. 
Something like this is badly needed, given the prepronderance of private
event loops in more and more libraries. (I remember well getting TCL to
work with GNU Readline, for example.) 

-- 
Kenneth Albanowski (kjahds@kjahds.com, CIS: 70705,126)