Re: glib: processing events in multiple threads

[Chris Vine <chris cvine freeserve co uk>]

On Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:06:38 -0400
"Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 10:58 AM, Chris Vine
> <chris cvine freeserve co uk>wrote:
> > On Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:44:43 -0400
> > "Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net> wrote:
> > > On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 10:40 AM, Chris Vine
> > > <chris cvine freeserve co uk>wrote:
[snip]
> > > > In this example, the worker thread is sending stuff back to the
> > > > main program thread's main loop.  It presumes that the main
> > > > program thread has passed the work to the worker beforehand in
> > > > an appropriate way. That could be by starting a new thread for
> > > > it, by pushing it onto a thread pool, or by giving the worker
> > > > thread its own main loop and pushing work to it with an idle
> > > > source (you can't use g_idle_add() or g_idle_add_full() for
> > > > that because those functions do not enable you to choose your
> > > > GMainContext, but it is trivial to write you own function to do
> > > > this in order to hand work to any thread's main loop).
[snip]
> > > Has anybody looked into GTask? It's a simple way to make a worker
> > > thread for some heavy processing, give it some data, and be
> > > notified on its completion or failure.
> > >
> > > It's the recommended way to run a synchronous task in another
> > > thread in the GNOME world.
> >
> > That is well mentioned.  It has a nice implementation if you are
> > stuck with C, provided you have glib-2.36 available.  So far, I
> > think the only stable distribution with that version is ubuntu
> > raring.  Possibly arch may just have acquired it.
> Note that GTask replaced GSimpleAsyncResult, which has a considerably
> lousier API, but is still workable for doing the same thing. If you
> need more availability, you should use that.

And with a hideous API as you say.  If using C and in the absence of
GTask (or in the event of GTask being suitable for the job in hand) I
would use one of the other three methods mentioned.

Chris