[Gtk1-win-developers] Re: GTK, CinePaint, and threads

[Robin R. <ro...@Mo...>]

Tor Lillqvist writes:
> Federico Mena Quintero writes:
>  > It looks like your main showstopper is the threading issue on Win32.
>  > Maybe you would like to invest some time in fixing it?
>
> And are you sure, Robin, that FLTK is any better in this regard?

First, Federico is entirely mistaken that our main issue with GTK2 has to do
with threading.

Many projects rely upon gtk.org for support and you kindly help them when
you can. You have another class of user that independently fixes bugs, is
not waiting for anyone's support. We're in that group. The biggest issue for
us with GTK is size. GTK2 has more lines of code (10mb+) than CinePaint
(about 7mb of source code). Why should we need to allocate more QA resources
to maintaining GTK than we do to our own project? Unintentionally that's
what we've done, and it doesn't work. Our project came almost to a
standstill as we struggled with GTK. It takes too much time to get our heads
around GTK because there is too much of it. Our biggest motivation to
migrate to FLTK is not features but that it is 30x smaller, a size we can
handle.

Regarding message deadlock in a Windows thread, the general solution to is
to run a message pump in the thread to clear the queue. My code in CinePaint
inadvertently put to sleep a thread that needs to be awake for a Windows
call. That is my bug, not GTK. Upon reflection, I don't know that there is a
threading problem in GTK.

Robin
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Rob...@Mo...   Hollywood, California
www.CinePaint.org   Open source digital motion picture film software