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shyrobbiani / x-go-binding

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thread safety #10

Open GoogleCodeExporter opened 8 years ago

GoogleCodeExporter commented 8 years ago 
I think one desirable characteristic of XGB is thread safety. It allows for 
truly parallel tasks that both perform X actions.

One example use is in my window manager. When I manage a new client, there are 
a few images that need to be converted to pixmaps. It's an ideal task to 
background. With thread safety in XGB, I can now do something like this and be 
reasonably confident things will be ok:

  manage(client) {
    go func() {
      // generate some images; they may be large!
    }

    // do non-cpu intensive stuff to manage client
  }

Obviously, there are tons of other places where this might be useful---but I 
think stuff related to image manipulation/painting are the most likely 
candidates.

My approach to thread safety was to encapsulate replies in goroutines. This 
seemed like the most obvious approach (to one who is inexperienced with 
goroutines and channel usage), but incurs the overhead of channels and 
goroutines every time a request requires a reply. However, I've been told that 
goroutines are quite cheap :-)

I haven't done much testing yet, but it has survived some non-trivial stress 
testing with my window manager.

I'm still not completely happy with everything, but comments and criticisms are 
welcome.

My threadsafe branch is here: 
http://code.google.com/r/jamslam-x-go-binding/source/browse/?name=threadsafe#hg%
2Fxgb

Original issue reported on code.google.com by jamslam@gmail.com on 15 Apr 2012 at 8:04