Re: Quitting a child thread's GMainLoop

[Chris Vine <chris cvine freeserve co uk>]

On Wed, 04 Aug 2010 17:50:42 -0400
Tony Cebzanov <tonycpsu gmail com> wrote:

> 
> I'm developing a multi-threaded GLib application.  Each thread,
> including the main thread, has its own GMainLoop for polling input
> sources.
> 
> This works well, but I'm having trouble finding an elegant way to
> shutdown the child threads from the main thread, because the "main
> loops" I want to quit live in the child threads.  Is there any way I
> can quit the main loop of a child thread from a parent thread?  Can a
> parent thread somehow access the "main loop context" of a child
> thread and tell it to quit somehow?
> 
> I know I can pass in data (such as the address of a gboolean
> "shutdown" variable) to the g_thread_create call(), but how does the
> child thread check this flag when running in a GMainLoop?  It seems a
> bit silly and wasteful to create an idle GSource just to check a quit
> flag -- but is that the only way to do it?

I have probably not understood what you are trying to do, but if all
the threads have their own main loops why not have the main thread pass
an idle callback to the thread(s) you want to end which calls
g_main_loop_quit()/gtk_main_quit()? If you have called
g_thread_init() then the main loops will all be thread safe.

Chris