Multithreading issues with wx application

[gasko]

We have developed an app using wxWidgets. We are now incorporating graphics using Vulkan.

When using threads it is sometimes necessary to "Sleep" the main thread to wait for worker threads to stop. This method works when wxWidgets is not used. However when wxWidgets is used, any sleep function call causes all the threads to sleep.

We can solve this by appropriately calling the wx function "Yield" but this causes "shearing" in the Graphics for some reason.

Is there some other method we can use to cause the main thread to wait for worker threads to finish? This is all done in a highly speed critical process so would prefer an efficient solution which "decouples" wx from the threaded jobs.

Thanks a lot

[doublemax@work]

However when wxWidgets is used, any sleep function call causes all the threads to sleep.

That doesn't make any sense to me.
1) that shouldn't happen at all
2) it shouldn't be related to wxWidets
Maybe you're not describing it well.

Without knowing any details, i'd suggest to just create another thread that waits for the others to finish, and then send an event to the main thread (if needed).

[jpo234]

I'm not sure what your worker threads are doing, but the main (GUI) thread should never block. I would get a std::future from std::async, poll them in a single worker thread that then calls wxApp::CallAfter to send the result back to the main thread.

[evstevemd]

1. Don't put sleep in the main thread. It will block and freeze the UI
2. If your redrawing functions are in response to thread events then stop sending events fro threads
3. If there are things that need to be disabled, then when you are ready, just disable the parent like panel so that app stops interacting with the user

By any means avoid freezing main thread and sleep is a sure way to do just that!