On Wed, 14 Apr 2010 10:01:15 +0530 Nischal Rao <rao.nisc...@gmail.com> wrote: > Let me explain the entire scenario. > > I need to be listening to a socket for data from an external program. > I do this using an infinite loop. Once i get the data, i call a > function and after it returns I go back into infinite loop again. > While all this is happening I also need to listen to some signals > (libwnck signals, which work using the gtk_main() loop). Since > gtk_main() blocks, I created a new thread for the infinite loop. > > I got one idea now. I created a separate thread just to listen to a > socket (while the other thread is listening for signals). Is it > possible to listen to the socket through the main event loop? If so, > please let me know how (possibly with an example). I can then safely > remove the thread.
OK, that makes a bit more sense. As someone else has said, g_io_add_watch() is intended for this kind of situation. You can read/write in the callback using the GIOChannel object but you are not obliged to do so (you could use unix read/write or sockets recv/sendin the callback for example). However, having a dedicated thread for the socket in this kind of case is not entirely off the wall and may be the better solution if you have a large amount of traffic, but it does introduce complications. If you want to have a dedicated thread for the socket I would still do all accessing of GTK+ in the main program thread rather than use gdk_threads_enter() and gdk_threads_leave(). You can send event callbacks from the server thread to the main program thread using g_idle_add()/g_idle_add_full() (a somewhat misleading name as with g_idle_add_full() you can choose any priority you want). Both those functions are thread safe (in fact, all of the main loop is thread safe). Another solution if you want a multi-threaded solution is to let the gio module do the work for you (http://library.gnome.org/devel/gio/stable/): see in particular the gio asynchronous functions. (There is another poor choice of names here: gio is completely different to, and in some respects supercedes, GIOChannel, although it is really a replacement for gnome VFS.) Chris _______________________________________________ gtk-app-devel-list mailing list gtk-app-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-app-devel-list
