Re: Making GLib thread-safe

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com> writes:

> I keep running into GLib thread safety issues coding my current
> GNOME app.
> 
> Has anyone put any work towards making GLib thread-safe?  I'd like
> to start a new CVS branch and push forward towards this goal, unless
> anyone has objections.
> 
> It seems to me like I should only have to define mutexes for each
> static variable.  And if _REENTRANT is not defined, the mutex locks
> evaluate to null calls.
> 
> (I'm searching the gtk-list archives now for glib+thread references)

Such questions (and anything about future work planned for
GTK+) should probably be directed to gtk-devel-list@redhat.com.
There has been some discussion there recently about adding
threading primitives to GLIB, but nothing that I remember
about adding reentrancy to GLIB itself.

(Having reentrancy in GLIB is a little less urgent, since GTK+
is only going to be explicit-locking thread-safe in the
near future, but glib is a pretty useful library, so I
suppose it would be nice to be able to use it in threaded
code without grabbing the global GTK+ lock. 

Some care would have to be done to make sure that this didn't kill
performance - perhaps some resources like the GList free
lists should be per-thread)

Regards,
                                        Owen