Threading (plus random question)

[Richard Gaskin]

Rod McCall wrote:

 > I asked a similar question a few years back, but is threading now
 > supported in LiveCode? Or indeed are there any plans to support it?

Like Mike said, if you need concurrency you can get that today with 
multiprocessing.  On OS X and Linux this is nearly as efficient as 
multithreading, and on all platforms often regarded as less of a 
headache. :)

We've discussed multithreading support in discussions here in the past, 
but once the conversation got around to the difficult work of design 
details it seems folks lost interest and we moved on to other things.

If you merely need parallelism, some tasks can benefit from using idle 
clock cycles with timers.  I made a quickie sample stack to play around 
with some of that:
http://fourthworld.net/channels/lc/IdleHour.rev

I've considered crafting a library to help manage multiprocessing, but I 
have to admit that while it's a fun prospect I don't actually have any 
project requiring it at the moment.

If you can describe your anticipated use for threads perhaps we can help 
either find a solution with what we have, or refine a feature request 
into something actionable.

And if your threading interest is for asynchronous GIF playback, 
ohdeargawd how we need that now, and I've submitted a request for that 
particular piece already:
http://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7600

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com