[Openmcl-devel] thread overview

[Gary Byers]

On Sun, 22 Aug 2004, alex crain wrote:

>
> All the thread stuff makes sense, including giving a dedicated thread
> to each edit window,
> but why is there a separate houskeeping thread for COCOA? Why not just
> use the main
> thread for that stuff since it already runs the periodic events?
>

The main (initial) thread isn't "already running periodic events" in the
Cocoa environment, it's waiting for and handling Cocoa events.

At one point, I tried to do housekeeping periodically in the Cocoa event
thread (via an NSTimer).  One of the periodic activities is to FORCE-
OUTPUT on listener output streams; since the Cocoa event thread is also
responsible for processing that "output" when it appears as input on
the other side of a pty pair, there were all kinds of ways to deadlock.
(The gory details are especially ... gory.)