Re: Inter-thread communication with NSPort

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 3 Feb 2007, at 07:32, Tima wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to make a client-server application in GNUstep.
> Right now it seems that the best way to do the client is to
> make it a two-threaded application, with a main thread processing
> GUI events and a "worker" thread waiting and reading messages
> from socket-related NSInputStream.
>
> I want the worker thread to notify the main one when the message is  
> ready.
> After reading Apple documentation for some time I got an impression
> that I need to send message to main thread's NSPort, it will be  
> delivered
> via -handlePortMessage: method of the port's delegate.
>
> First of all, is it really the intended way to do communication
> between threads?

No ... you should use distributed objects over an NSConnection.
While in theory you can work with ports directly, it's certainly not  
recommended and is considerably more complex for you to code than  
using NSConnections.

However, fort the one-way communication you describe, probably the  
simplest and most efficient option would be for your worker thread to  
use the -performSelectorOnMainThread:withObject:waitUntilDone:modes:  
method of NSObject.

PS. I think you probably have the ports the wrong way round in your  
port message.