Question

I have a producer and a consumer. Producer fills its internal queue with objects, consumer takes these objects one by one. I want to synchronize the cosumer with the producer, so that the consumer blocks when there are no objects ready, and I want to synchronize the producer with itself, so that it stops producing when the queue is full (and starts again when there’s space). How do I do that? I was able to solve a simpler case without the queue using NSConditionalLock, but with the queue the problem looks more complex.

Answer 1

I ended up using two semaphores, objectsReady and bufferFreeSlots:

@implementation Producer

- (id) getNextObject {
    [objectsReady wait];
    id anObject = [[buffer objectAtIndex:0] retain];
    [buffer removeObjectAtIndex:0];
    [bufferFreeSlots signal];
    return [anObject autorelease];
}

- (void) decodeLoop {
    while (1) {
        [bufferFreeSlots wait];
        [buffer push:[self produceAnObject]];
        [objectsReady signal];
    }
}

@end

The bufferFreeSlots is initialized to the maximum queue size. So far it seems to work, but God knows this is an act of faith, not a solid confidence.