Re: NSThread patch for foreign thread registration

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Monday, September 29, 2003, at 07:49 PM, Leigh Smith wrote:

> I have a patch to NSThread that enables threads originating from 
> outside GNUstep (such as timer based callbacks) to be registered and 
> therefore usable within GNUstep, allowing NSAutorelease pools to be 
> set up.

Thanks for the patch but ... I think it would do more harm than good, 
in that it would hide problems.

By the time the function your patch modifies (GSCurrentThread()) is 
called, a lot of other GNUstep code could have been executed without 
the GNUstep threading system having been notified that it is in a 
multi-threaded application, and there is therefore a lot of potential 
for thread safety problems to have manifested.  If a program is using 
threads (other than via the NSThread API) to access GNUstep objects, it 
MUST register those threads first in order to maintain thread safety... 
registering them the first time they try to access the current NSThread 
object is too late.

I've modified the message printed when GSCurrentThread() can't find an 
NSThread object for the current thread ... hopefully it's more 
meaningful now.