Subj : Re: Does pthread emit a sigchld signal on successful exit?
To   : comp.programming.threads
From : chuckles
Date : Fri Aug 19 2005 05:47 am

Interesting,  I have been using Jini and Corba for some time so I had
gotten quite used to the idea of events as a means of asynchronous
notification. Which is why I was so willing to believe that pthreads
would have a means of asynchronous notification of termination. However
to complicate matters further I designed the GUI in glade-2 and use an
xml reference pointer to instantiate widgets at run time. So its not so
much a GUI as a number of classes which extract widgets and connect
signals to the widgets using sigc calls, which are controlled via a
main gui thread. As I am trying to avoid a mess of pointers to objects
flowing around my program the processing threads are all called via a
processing interface, which I presume complicates matters further.
As a simple example imagine once the button has been pressed the button
widget is replaced with a clicked button widget, a means of notifying
the main gui thread to redraw the original unclicked widget is what I'm
after. I think polling for the end of thread processing is a waste of
clock cycles. Could I maybe emit a user defined signal once processing
has completed? That way I could use a handler to catch it and maybe
define different signals for the various types of processing complete
return values which could be encountered during processing. This really
doesn't seem like a giant leap of imagination but my only reference in
terms of pthreads are the man pages and the Unix Network Programming
text. The text is informative but pthreads are used in a specific way
(usually to handle multiple incoming requests), the main thread does
not necessarily need to be informed about the status of each individual
thread. Not sure if this sheds any more light on the problem, thanks
for your help.

C.

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