RE: [GD-Windows] Stopping a thread cleanly

[Jon W. <hp...@mi...>]

> Actually, I'm not giving it instructions -- it's completely autonomous
> based on the parameter passed to it which is a pointer to the shared
> data it needs to operate on.  It doesn't have any communication

I don't see why a critical section would be necessary in that loop. 
There's no shared state going on between the player and the killer, 
except for the event, which is protected enough without the critical 
section.

Anyway, the problem with this is that you delay shut-down (while 
spinning, waiting for that global) for whatever your sleep time is. 
DirectSound supports playback notifier events, so you can set an 
event, say, every 100 milliseconds played, and use this event to 
wake up and fill the buffer. Or you can use your "shutdown" event 
with an appropriate time-out as your sleep thing, if you're OK 
with polling.

playerThread:

for(;;) {
  if( WaitForSingleObject( event, POLL_INTERVAL ) == WAIT_TIMEOUT ) {
    break;
  }
  lock buffer, read disk, unlock buffer
}

stopper:

  SetEvent( event );
  WaitForSingleObject( playerThread, INFINITE );


Regarding declaring members or globals "volatile" when they're shared 
between threads: that's what the keyword is for, so I don't see how 
that is considered ugly (assuming you need that semantic)?

Cheers,

			/ h+