[Python-Dev] Twisted Isn't Specific (was Re: Trial balloon: microthreads library in stdlib) (original) (raw)

Bob Ippolito bob at redivi.com
Thu Feb 15 22:26:24 CET 2007

On 2/15/07, Baptiste Carvello <baptiste13 at altern.org> wrote:

>> Ah, threads :-( It turns out that you need to invoke GetMessage in the >> context of the thread in which the window was created. In a different >> thread, you won't get any messages. > > I'd be interested to hear about other situations where threading would > cause a problem. My suspicion is that Windows is the hard one, and as > I've shown that one is solvable. > > I've tried something similar on Linux, with gtk an wx.

You can run the gtk main loop in its own thread, but because gtk is not thread safe, you have to grab a mutex everytime you run gtk code outside the thread the mainloop is running in. So you have to surround your calls to the gtk api with calls to gtk.threadsenter and gtk.threadsleave. Except for callbacks of course, because they are executed in the main thread... Doable, but not fun. The same goes for wx. Then all hell breaks loose when you try to use both gtk and wx at the same time. That's because on Linux, the wx main loop calls the gtk mainloop behind the scenes. As far as I know, that problem can not be solved from python. So yes that strategy can work, but it's no silver bullet.

And it's worse on Windows and Mac OS X where some GUI API calls must happen on a particular thread or they simply don't work.

-bob

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