GdaThreadWrapper

GdaThreadWrapper — Execute functions in a sub thread

Synopsis


#include <libgda/thread-wrapper/gda-thread-wrapper.h>

Description

The purpose of the GdaThreadWrapper object is to execute functions in an isolated sub thread. As the GdaThreadWrapper is thread safe, one is able to isolate some code's execution is a private worker thread, and make a non thread safe code thread safe.

The downside of this is that the actual execution of the code will be slower as it requires threads to be synchronized.

The GdaThreadWrapper implements its own locking mechanism and can safely be used from multiple threads at once without needing further locking.

Each thread using a GdaThreadWrapper object can use it as if it was the only user: the GdaThreadWrapper will simply dispatch all the execution requests to its private worker thread and report the execution's status only to the thread which made the request.

The user can also specify a callback function to be called when an object exmits a signal while being used by the worker thread, see the gda_thread_wrapper_connect_raw() method.

The following diagram illustrates the conceptual working of the GdaThreadWrapper object: here two user threads are represented (assigned a red and green colors), both using a single GdaThreadWrapper, so in this diagram, 3 threads are present. The communication between the threads are handled by some GAsyncQueue objects (in a transparent way for the user, presented here only for illustration purposes). The queue represented in yellow is where jobs are pushed by each user thread (step 1), and popped by the worker thread (step 2). Once the user thread has finished with a job, it stores the result along with the job and pushes it to the queue dedicated to the user thread (step 3) in this example the red queue (because the job was issued from the thread represented in red). The last step is when the user fetches the result (in its user thread), step 4.

If, when the worker thread is busy with a job, a signal is emitted, and if the user has set up a signal handler using gda_thread_wrapper_connect_raw(), then a "job as signal" is created by the worker thread and pushed to the user thread as illustrated at the bottom of the diagram.

GdaThreadWrapper's conceptual working

Details