Re: signals interrupting wgetch

[Thomas Dickey]

On Thu, 21 Jul 2005, John Gruenenfelder wrote:

> As long as the subject is up, are there any caveats I should know about when
> using ncurses in a multithreaded program?  I don't recall seeing anything
> specific in the documentation.

Well, since it uses global data (stdscr, newscr, curscr, and of course
the input FIFO), only one thread should do I/O.  wgetnstr() is an example
where the call does both input and output.

It "should" be possible to make waddch() threadsafe by putting a mutex on 
the WINDOW* so only one thread could write to a window at a time. But even 
with that, there are complications (a subwin() call returns data that's 
shared with the parent window for instance).  Also, wrefresh() would have 
to be modified (since the global windows are updated there).  I think it
would be interesting to see if those two (waddch and wrefresh) could be
modified to make some useful support for threading.

I don't think making wgetch() threadsafe would be very useful (though one
could certainly design an application to use that).

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net