Nicolas Oury wrote:
I don't know if what I say is pertinent, but there was another problem that was discussed in the thread about threaded RTS. One may want to use a finalizer in a particular thread. For example, a finalizer that put make a rotating cube on screen must be ran in the same thread as the Opengl/GLUT things...
Good point. That feature won't be covered by my first proposal (As I said, I'll write up a proper document about that ASAP, that is, as soon as I find an entire hour of free time). It sounds useful at first, but I'm not that sure about it: after all, we can't rely on when the finalizer will be executed: the thread might no longer be around, and the GLUT window might be long closed. We should definitely think about it a little more, though.
I don't know if it is planned but I think it could be great to be able to have, in the new OS thread for OpenGL, an "expressivity only" concurrence system. I mean that to be able to fork user threads that are executed in the new OS thread. These new threads would be blocked on other threads in that kernel thread blocked, but can all access to this library, and will make programming easier.
This sounds a lot like the "thread group" idea that somebody had when we last discussed this. I think it gives us added flexibility at the cost of more difficult implementation and the danger of accidentally blocking OS threads [it might be just yet another source of bugs]. I'll first write up something in order to explain/accurately define the simple solution I proposed. After that, we can still design a more complex solution that addresses these two issues. Cheers, Wolfgang Thaller