Thanks for the quick response guys.
A bit more of a description of what I'm working on may help. Basically, I'm working on building a coordination library for use in programs taking part in a distributed simulation. The simulations themselves are written primarily in C++, run on a bunch of different platforms, and are often optomized to use the specific hardware they're running on top of (C-threads locked to specific CPUs, arcane compiler flags, the whole shebang). The Python/Twisted side handles all the high-level coordination stuff while the C++ code focuses on numerics.
As the library is supposed to be as generic as possible, I can't make too many assumptions about how threading will be handled in any particular application. So to keep things simple I'm creating a single thread that is dedicated to running the Python interpreter and allowing only that thread to touch the interpreter.
I looked into the code for reactor.callFromThread that y'all mentioned and it looks like the implementation for it exactly answers the question I've been trying to ask. On posix systems the reactor's 'waker' is implemented as a pair of pipes and on Win32 systems it's implemented as a pair of sockets. So it appears that my original approach will work except that on Win32 systems I'll just have to use a socket rather than a pipe.
Thanks for the help,
Tom
BTW Itamar, I took a look at the SmartFrog/Coil documentation you sent out yesterday and it looks very promising. Do you have any sort of roadmap/timeline for Coil?
On 7/7/05, Itamar Shtull-Trauring itamar@itamarst.org wrote:
On Thu, 2005-07-07 at 13:48 -0400, Tom Cocagne wrote:
I was wondering if anyone has suggestions for a good way to goabout setting up a message-passing communication channel between one or more C threads and a single thread dedicated to running Python/Twisted. I already have functional Python bindings accessing the contents of the messages (basically C structures) but need some way to exchange the messages between the C threads and the Python thread.
Any reason you're using threads? You can run Twisted directly on the glib event loop, so your whole program could run on the same loop.
In any case, Switching data from Twisted to C is just like passing data from any Python program to C code: call a C extension function from Python that calls into C code, and for reverse call a Python function from C code. Thread safety is mostly orthogonal, so you can probably use the standard Twisted reactor.callFromThread to have code run in the Twisted thread.
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