On Jan 7, 2009, at 7:28 PM, John Cassington wrote:
After testing, the dictionary concept works perfectly! Thanks!
Careful! Unless you're synchronizing access to the mutable dictionary, this is not thread-safe. Even if it appears to work in some cases, it's likely to blow up in your face in real-world use.
With regard to the originating thread retaining a reference to the dictionary, is there a way for the original thread to know when processing has completed on the secondary thread? I would like my method to be run on a separate thread, but be able to return a value to the caller in the normal fashion.
This last sentence doesn't make any sense. Why put the work on a separate thread if you're just going to block waiting for it to complete anyway? And the answer is, no you can't do that. It's the difference between a detached vs. a joinable thread. Cocoa doesn't have any direct support for joinable threads, although the underlying pthreads API does.
I would recommend that your originating thread detach the worker thread and then return to its caller and probably back to its run loop (the event loop, if it's the main thread). When the worker thread is finished, you can use -performSelectorOnMainThread:... or - performSelector:onThread:... to invoke a method on the originating thread. That method would be the continuation of the process of the originating thread -- it would receive the result of the work as a parameter and do whatever is appropriate with it.
Regards, Ken _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
