Re: [gtk-list] Re: thread safe gtk?

[Sami Juhani Kallio <samik eiffel com>]

Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> writes:

> Sami Juhani Kallio <samik@eiffel.com> writes:
> 

[answer deleted]

Thanks for your answer. I think your solution is good for our
purposes. 

> > I am thinking that why cannot GTK be thread safe by default? Is this
> > a stupid idea?
> 
> Complexity, overhead, and manpower.  The proportion of threaded
> programs is still reasonably small, and getting thread safety right is
> both quite difficult and takes valuable time away from the main work
> of getting a good graphics library finished.  It would be nice to have
> gtk thread safe "out of the box, but that's not practical right now,
> and it also might make gtk substantially less efficient if not handled
> carefully.
> 

I think that the proportion of threaded (GUI) programs on Unix is only
small because of the missing support from GUI toolkits (and because
thread implementations are quite new anyway). I see a big potential on
threaded applications. Almost every application I use would be much
better if multithreaded.

I understand the reasons complexity, overhead, and manpower, but I
would think that two of them are not so bad. You could move the
complexity from the applications into the library, which is usually
only a good thing. And even when using the manpower in library
development, you will save that in applications programming. The issue
of overhead still remains and affects the application which have no
reason to be multithreaded. I don't know how big the overhead would
be, but once designed carefully in the library, all the pain would be
away from the application developing.

In my opinion, this is also a very important issue if we want GTK to
be a really good alternative. For example, Motif 2.1 and Win32 are
already thread safe.


> Regardless, it's especially not a priority since relatively good
> workarounds exist.
> 

That's true. But if this is is technically possible to do in the
library without too big overhead, it would be the right way, in my
opinion.



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