Re: [GUI] Another call for votes

Nick Name wrote:

On Mon, 17 Mar 2003 22:45:07 +0100 Wolfgang Thaller wrote:

...

4d) First wait and see if 4c is implementable; if not, fall back to 4b.

Well, I agree on everything and would directly vote for 4b, but instead I ask: what is the true problem here? If callbacks are serialized, what's the problem in allowing any thread to call CGA functions?

Well, even if the callbacks are serialized, we're back to full concurrency as soon as people want to use forkIO in their applications. So if you forkIO, do some calculation, and then try to display a dialog box when the calculation is finished, you can either rely on 4c or do some interthread messaging to fulfill the requirement that everything is called from one thread. If the windowing system allows everything, we get thread-safety for free, but if it doesn't allow it, we might have to do some work to achieve it in the CGA. The amount of work required will be different for different backends. Some people have doubted that this is easy enough for us to implement, but personally I don't see why. I've added 4d to the list because I feel that it will be hard to convince them at this early stage, and we lose nothing by postponing the decision.

There is a chance that some windowing system allows this. For example, mutual exclusion could be required for drawing on a surface, but not for registering a callback, so while a thread is drawing, another could be allowed to register callbacks.

Yes. Other toolkits will just assume that there is only one thread talking to them, so everything will need mutual exclusion. Yet other toolkits will allow concurrent drawing to two different windows, but will crash when you try to open a dialog box while another thread is handling events. And so on. That's what I don't like about 4a and 4b: It will be next to impossible for application programmers to add thread-safety, because the requirements are platform dependent. Of course, 4c doesn't mean that the user will no longer have to synchronize anything - you still have to protect your application's shared state. Cheers, Wolfgang