[Pysdl-devel] Threads and events

[Jan E. <ch...@in...>]

Hi all,

I was wondering wether the PySDL library is thread safe, especially the
event mechanism. I'm new to threading in Python (threads in C are
familiar), so I may be asking stupid things here.

I'll need to read and write data from/to a socket, and want to do it
asynchronously, outside my main event loop. Easiest thing is to have two
threads for handling the incoming and outgoing traffic, and have outgoing
data put on a synchronized queue and incoming data being added to the main
PySDL event loop using:

	events_add( event_new(USEREVENT) )

My main thread would then know that something was received. Ok, so far so
good. Apparently PySDL *is* htreadsafe, as the documentation states:

"The thread management in the SDL library is covered in the core Python
language, so there is no thread subsystem in pySDL."

This makes me believe that I can from any thread add events to the queue,
especially as I haven't found any method for locking PySDL or the event
queue. Or am I wrong here?

Another thing that I was wondering about was that the USEREVENTs that are
created seem to make it impossible for me to attach own data to them?
Ideally I'd like to send the received data along with the new USEREVENT
I'm creating, which would make it really easy for the main thread to
handle.

An alternative is to just add USEREVENTs and now data. The main thread
would then when it receives one of them check a separate synchronized 
queue of incoming data.


How do you others handle these issues in PySDL and Python? I'm a beginner
at both, so all ideas/hints/caveats etc are more than welcome! As a side
not I must say that it is real fun to develop using PySDL. It is big
complete enough to let me do anything I need while still being small
enough to not get in the way of doing stuff.

	
	Regards, Chakie

--------------------+--------------------------------------------------------
Jan 'Chakie' Ekholm |     Balrog New Media    http://www.balrog.fi/
   Linux Inside     | I'm the blue screen of death, nobody hears your screams