On 05/10/2006, at 1:40, Dar Scott wrote:
What kinds of things might be shared among threads? Should a thread communicate with any threads other than its parent? What kind of communication? "Do this and let me know when you are finished." "Do this, show progress, and let me know when you are finished." Bidirectional message queue. Send messages to a thread in 'send' style.
My initial idea would be that when you send a message you could do so indicating it should be run it it's own thread (or in an existing thread that you know the name of). By default each object (button, field, card etc) would have a mutex that you must hold to update it's attributes or to run any of its handlers (this would be acquired automatically). It would be possible to do finer grained locking if the programmer took the trouble to code it. The automatic acquisition of locks would be dependent on some global property (that might also be used to permit the creation of threads in the first place) so there would be no overhead for non-threaded stacks.
There wouldn't need to be any special methods of communication if it was done this way. A thread would terminate when the original handler completed.
This is just my initial thoughts...there may be flaws I haven't thought of. There are still details like how to terminate threads on exit, what do do on deadlock (or if it's the programmers job to avoid it) etc to be considered.
Andrew _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
