Re: Proper way to provide gtk+ app with asynchronous data?

[Tristan Van Berkom <vantr touchtunes com>]

Christer Palm wrote:
> John Cupitt wrote:
> > Very simple and easy to program. I'm assuming writing 4 bytes to a
> > pipe is atomic, I guess. I've not had problems (even on SMP machines),
> > but it would be easy to add a global mutex for the pipe writers.
>
> Oh, by the way. On a POSIX conformant system, a write to a pipe _is_ 
> guaranteed to be atomic as long as it's no larger than PIPE_BUF (from 
> limits.h) bytes. So 4 bytes should be safe.

   Just to point out one of the million possible solutions to this age
old problem ('cause I liked this solution alot when I heard of it, I have
to admit I haven't had the oportunity to try it myself since), you can
create your own GSource that pops off elements from a GAsyncQueue and
use that "source" in your recieving thread and in your publishing thread
you can push datum on to that queue and call `g_main_context_wakeup()'
on the recieving thread's context (ofcourse you can wrap that up in a pretty
little convinient api...).

    I'm not sure exactly how much you gain in performance by using this
aproach, but I always though that using pipes to communicate between
threads is a kind of hack.

Cheers,
                                   -Tristan