Actually, while reading up on NSThread I cam across NSOperation which
appears to spawn a new thread but is supposedly much cleaner to work
with. It definately does the job for me. Thanks everyone for your help
with this problem.
- Don
On Apr 10, 2008, at 5:13 PM, Wade Tregaskis wrote:
Threads are almost always the right way to do what the OP wants.
The problem as was presented is that there's some work to do, which
happens to be dividable into N segments. There were no bounds
placed on how long it takes to run any individual segment. And even
if there were, they'd probably be wrong - just about anything your
code does can be delayed unexpectedly in weird and wonderful ways.
No, the correct approach is to do your work on a separate thread.
In Leopard you can send messages between threads trivially using
performSelector:onThread:withObject:waitUntilDone:, which makes it
very simple to tell your worker thread to stop, or send results &
status back to the main thread, etc.
It's worth doing this properly if only for the sake of learning how
to do it. Concurrency is the way of the future, like it or not, and
threads are the primary way to get that concurrency. They're more
resistant to numerous failure modes (such as unexpected blocking,
excessively long work periods, and more) and they scale better - you
can do other stuff, you could run two threads concurrently to do a
second set of work, etc. And, naturally, they give you performance
scaling that is potentially even better than linear.
Sorry if that all sounds a bit pious, but I personally feel it's
really important that people don't try to use crutches like timers
or delayed performs, that are only going to be a liability sooner or
later.
Wade
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