From: Praful <praful007@...>
Date: 2008-03-02T02:04:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Threads in RubyCocoa apps

On Feb 28, 9:32 pm, Alex Fenton <a...@deleteme.pressure.to> wrote:
> Praful wrote:
> > I'm writing a GUI that starts a worker thread using Thread.start. The
> > Cocoa docs say that you should update the GUI using the main thread
> > only. However, the examples that ship with Leopard, eg SimpleApp, have
> > a thread that update the GUI from the thread without passing it to the
> > main thread.
>
> When the Cocoa (Objective C) docs talk about threads, I would assume
> they're referring to operating system threads. Ruby 1.8 threads are not
> operating system threads - they're implemented within the interpreter.
> Since all Ruby 1.8 threads are within the same operating system thread,
> so it's usually safe to call GUI code in any thread.
>
> A little bit of care can be needed, because ruby's thread scheduler can
> potentially switch context in a place where it shouldn't. For example,
> I've seen Carbon errors on OS X in wxRuby where it appears execution has
> switched inside an operation like drawing to a device context.
>
> alex

Many thanks Alex.