[Digikam-devel] Threading in digiKam

[Marcel Wiesweg]

> Hi Everyone!
> 
> The GSoC community bonding period has started. My exams just got over and
> I'm trying to get familiar with digiKam's workings.
> Now, a major concern is that libface's methods should be thread-safe to be
> usable in digKam.
> 
> pthreads are POSIX-only. So, I'd like to know what sort of threading
> digiKam uses. I can browse the code myself, but it'd be faster if someone
> points me to some relevant source files which make use of threading, just
> so that I can learn quicker.

Of course, we use Qt ;-) 
If you now feel the need, reconsider to build upon Qt Core at least. It's 
about as cross-platform as it gets nowadays.

Also think about if you want to have thread-safety or reentrancy:

Reentrancy is often easily achieved. Store your data in a C++ object and do 
not use any global-static data structures. Now a single object can only be 
used from a single thread, but this is usually absolutely sufficient.
If usage of global-static data is needed for optimization purposes, it is 
critical to make this thread-safe, to mutex-protect them. See above for my Qt 
hint.

Thread-safe means that the same single object can be access from multiple 
threads. This requires strict mutex protection for all methods, but is usually 
unnecessary for objects like images.

Marcel