GTK+ Forums

I'm working on a program which will basically do a scan when the user presses a button. This scan will continue until they press the button again.

Would it be better/easier to create a thread once the button is pressed and then kill the thread once it is pressed again?

What are your thoughts?


Brian

If you dont use threads then once you press that button your app will probly lockup untill the scan is finished.

So i would say yes create a thread when the button is pressed and kill it when your done with your scan.

Multi-threading is not always necessary but may be helpful. The issue is synchronisation.

However, you might perhaps consider programming your scan in small steps, each called in an idle routine. (if you are interested in the theoretical buzzwords, learn about continuation-passing style which formalizes this intuition).

It actually depends of the kind of scan you are doing.

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Basile Starynkevitch (France)
http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/

Alright, I believe I'm going to just create and destroy threads when the button is pressed.

I began looking into continuation passing style which seemed interesting and could work, but I feel with my lack of knowledge of CPS I'd be better off with threads.

Also, the scan looks for local bluetooth devices.

Thanks, Brian

If the only thing the GUI needs to respond to is a "Cancel" button press, what I usually do is have my scan routine periodically call a function which updates a progress bar and gets the GUI to "catch up" using:



This allows the progress bar update (or label or statusbar) to take effect and also runs any callbacks such as the user clicking a cancel button. The cancel button callback will trip a "cancel" flag which is a static boolean variable which the scan function checks each iteration.

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Micah Carrick - Forum Administrator
http://www.micahcarrick.com

Thats very interesting. I don't think it would work in my situation because I am using a scan to verify if a bluetooth device is still in range.

What happens if you allocate memory in a thread and kill the thread before the allocated memory is freed? Will that cause memory leaks?

Brian

Memory allocation is a global thing, memory allocated in thread A can be used in thread B. So it doesn't mention that you kill thread before freeing memory allocated by it. You can still free this memory from other thread if you hold pointer to this memory. If you won't free it at all it will simply leak ;)