Mmm I see....

Well, right now I would say my worker thread is pretty much just reading values (size of image to generate etc)... but it's not "modifying" anything... it doesn't change any variables etc... just reads the info it needs to generate the images and ...well, generates the images...

If my worker thread doesn't have to "write" in any variables/objects whatever, shared with the UI, can I assume that it's safe to leave it like it is?


On 19-Nov-08, at 4:32 PM, Stefan Sinclair wrote:

In a word, yes :)

If you are accessing a piece of memory across threads, you should be making sure you are synchronizing any access to that memory which could occur across threads. For simple primitives (such as possibly your work progress number) just using an atomic integer would suffice. For more complicated access, you will want better protection (such as using locks around any APIs which can access your data). You're probably getting away with it now b/c your UI thread (the main thread) is only reading data (the work progress value - I'm guessing a single integer or floating point value which can be read/written in a single instruction) while the worker thread is modifying it. But it doesn't hurt to use proper thread-safe access patterns for data shared between threads even for small things like this.

-Stefan

> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> To: cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com
> Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:57:44 -0500
> Subject: Question about NSThread?
>
> I have an app that generates a bunch of images... the process can be
> long so I wanted to start it in a separate thread so that the UI can
> be responsive etc...
>
> basically the only thing I did was:
>
> [NSThread detachNewThreadSelector:@selector(doLongProcess)
> toTarget:self withObject:nil];
>
> and I added
>
> NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
>
> at the beginning of my doLongProcess method, and [pool release] at the
> end...
> Now the weird part is that... it appears to be working... the images
> are created...the UI stays responsive..my status textfield gets
> updated (it wasn't getting updated when the long process was not in a
> separate thread)...
>
> Am I wrong to think that it should've been much more complex than
> that? (With NSLocks and whatnot...) Maybe I should just shut up and be
> happy that it work, but somehow this doesn't seem right...
>
> Jean-Nicolas Jolivet
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://www.silverscripting.com
>
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