Clarification of thread safety of SDL_GetStringRule about sdl HOT 4 CLOSED

We could definitely make the pending-deletion list a thread-local thing, which will free everything if that thread pumps the event queue, or the thread terminates, but we chose the event queue because a) we already had something in place for dynamic event memory and b) every app (should) reliably call this function at a regular interval so the app wouldn't have to do anything new. But there's no reason we can't offer a way for a long-running thread that doesn't pump the event queue to clean the list out from time to time.

That's actually not a bad idea. That guarantees that the memory is thread-safe, and we can expose SDL_FlushEventMemory(0) as SDL_TrimThreadMemory() or SDL_GiveMyMemoryBackYouPeskyStringRule() or something. :)

from sdl.

This was the original reason we weren't going to go with this approach for SDL strings. I know we had some different ideas that all had drawbacks. @icculus, what was the final solution we landed on?

from sdl.

Hmm, the current documentation says the pointer is safe until the event queue runs from any thread, but yeah, that would be a surprising result for most people.

SDL_FreeLater() holds the event lock, so you can't lose a pointer to a race condition if the main thread is in the middle of running the event queue when it happens. Anything after that just makes the race after different, if the main thread is just calling the event queue in a tight loop: do we require the memory to live at least X milliseconds, or event pumps, before it's eligible? If the background thread gets hung up for a bit, still trouble,

Let me think on this a bit.

from sdl.

We could definitely make the pending-deletion list a thread-local thing, which will free everything if that thread pumps the event queue, or the thread terminates, but we chose the event queue because a) we already had something in place for dynamic event memory and b) every app (should) reliably call this function at a regular interval so the app wouldn't have to do anything new. But there's no reason we can't offer a way for a long-running thread that doesn't pump the event queue to clean the list out from time to time.

from sdl.