Spinning the main loop

[Sergei Steshenko <sergstesh yahoo com>]

--- On Wed, 9/15/10, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:

> From: Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>
> Subject: Re: Displaying a popup before the main window
> To: gtk-perl-list gnome org
> Date: Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 4:17 AM
> On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 11:45 +0100,
[snip]

> the rationale is: by spinning the main loop you're masking
> issues in
> your application. don't do that. I thought it was clear by
> the amount of
> scorn I used.
>
> ciao,
>  Emmanuele.


In my reality I have a set of calculations which might take up to a minute,
and tens of seconds typically. The calculations take as input the GUI
state and are triggered by it.

So, I intentionally spin the main loop. This is because there is an event
queue, and if I let the GUI to be responsive, it may accumulate the events
while the heavy calculations are in progress. When that happens, after the
completions of one round of the heavy calculations another one immediately
starts, so, it may take up to several minutes for the whole thing to
settle down. I think once it took half an hour or so.

Actually, not only I spin the main loop, I also hide the sensitive GUI
elements which may cause new events, i.e. there is, for example, no
physical possibility to change state of normally existing slider (called
"Adjustment") because the sliders are temporarily hidden.

One may find it ugly, but to mess up with the event queue might be even
uglier (for example, purging it until the last state change).

Regards,
  Sergei.