GTK multithreading

akseli0x61 · 10-17-2014, 09:29 AM

I'm writing a GTK+ application in C and I need to parse some data and load images from another thread. I found out that gdk_threads* is depricated and I should call all GDK and GTK functions from main loop. How can I achieve this? In simple words my problem is to add image widget to the window from another thread. Could I maybe execute some callback from the thread that would add the image?

a4z · 10-17-2014, 09:44 AM

your app has something like a message queue
your background thread makes his work, eg loading the data, and when finished it posts the result to the queue
you take the data from your main loop thread.

akseli0x61 · 10-17-2014, 02:12 PM

How can I use this message queue? I can't seem to find much about it. Or maybe I just don't know how to search..

a4z · 10-19-2014, 04:52 AM

depends on your actual use case,
for example, if you want to load data in the back ground,
than start the thread that loads the data, your GUI will continue what ever is does an not block
when finished this thread sets a atomic bool to true (which has been initialized to false of course, named done or so ...)
in you main loop you add an idle call that queries done, if done, thanks for the data, no problem that on other thread does something because the other thread is finished.
this is one possible use case,