https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=448769
--- Comment #3 from Evan Teran <ete...@alum.rit.edu> --- Right. So addressing this "right" is suprisingly complex. Basically the issue is that the code for doing arbitrary precision math has no "cancellation points". The conventional solution to this kind of thing is to do the work in a background thread, and have that thread periodically check "did the user cancel"... But the library we use (GMP) just does the work, start to finish. It doesn't ask the caller "should I continue?" at any point during a long calculation. Killing a thread mid-process is considered so dangerous, that many OSes don't even provide clean APIs to do it... The other solution, which GMP also doesn't offer, is to have the work done in small bits you can call repeatedly until complete, allowing the caller an oportunity to run the event loop themselves (and/or just stop calling the "do some work" function if the user wishes to cancel). One can imagine the math being done in a virtual machine of sorts where the caller can run as many or as few instructions towards solving the problem at a time as they please. Either way, Neither of these are really easily options for us. So what's the solution? Well, probably to literally have the work done in a seperate process which CAN be killed via a signal and communicate the results with a pipe. It will be complicated to do this nicely, but it's doable and would fully address this issue of long running calculations freezing the UI. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are watching all bug changes.
