Day: July 26, 2009

A technique that we started using in Tracker is utilizing the mainloop to do asynchronous functions. We decided that avoiding threads is often not a bad idea.

Instead of instantly falling back to throwing work to a worker thread we try to encapsulate the work into a GSource’s callback, then we let the callback happen until all of the work is done.

An example

You probably know sqlite3’s backup API? If not, it’s fairly simple: you do sqlite3_backup_init, followed by a bunch of sqlite3_backup_step calls, finalizing with sqlite3_backup_finish. How does that work if we don’t want to block the mainloop?

I removed all error handling for keeping the code snippet short. If you want that you can take a look at the original code.

static gboolean
backup_file_step (gpointer user_data)
{
  BackupInfo *info = user_data; int i;
  for (i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
    if ((info->result = sqlite_backup_step(info->backup_db, 5)) != SQLITE_OK)
        return FALSE;
  }
  return TRUE;
}

static void
backup_file_finished (gpointer user_data)
{
  BackupInfo *info = user_data;
  GError *error = NULL;
  if (info->result != SQLITE_DONE) {
    g_set_error (&error, _DB_BACKUP_ERROR,
                 DB_BACKUP_ERROR_UNKNOWN,
                 "%s", sqlite3_errmsg (
                    info->backup_db));
  }
  if (info->finished)
    info->finished (error, info->user_data);
  if (info->destroy)
    info->destroy (info->user_data);
  g_clear_error (&error);
  sqlite3_backup_finish (info->backup);
  sqlite3_close (info->db);
  sqlite3_close (info->backup_db);
  g_free (info);
}

void
my_function_make_backup (const gchar *dbf, OnBackupFinished finished,
                         gpointer user_data, GDestroyNotify destroy)
{
  BackupInfo *info = g_new0(BackupInfo, 1);
  info->user_data = user_data;
  info->destroy = destroy;
  info->finished = finished;
  info->db = db;
  sqlite3_open_v2 (dbf, &info->db, SQLITE_OPEN_READONLY, NULL);
  sqlite3_open ("/tmp/backup.db", &info>backup_db);
  info->backup = sqlite3_backup_init (info->backup_db, "main",
                                      info->db, "main");
  g_idle_add_full (G_PRIORITY_DEFAULT, backup_file_step,
                   info, backup_file_finished);
}

Note that I’m not suggesting to throw away all your threads and GThreadPool uses now.
Note that just like with threads you have to be careful about shared data: this way you’ll allow that other events on the mainloop will interleave your backup procedure. This is async(ish), it’s precisely what you want, of course.