Question

In Qt for instance if you emit a signal in a thread other that the GUI thread, the signal is enqueued and executed later in the GUI thread, is there a way to do that with boost?

thanks

Answer 1

For an event loop use boost::asio::io_service. You can post tasks inside this object and have another thread execute them, in a thread safe way:

struct MyClass
{
    boost::io_service service;
    void doSomethingOp() const { ... }

    void doSomething()
    {
        service.post(boost::bind(&MyClass::doSomethingOp, this));
    }

    void loop()
    {
            service.run(); // processes the tasks
    }
};

boost::signal<void()> mySignal;

MyClass myClass;
mySignal.connect(boost::bind(&MyClass::doSomething, boost::ref(myClass)));

// launches a thread and executes myClass.loop() there
boost::thread t(boost::bind(&MyClass::loop(), boost::ref(myClass)));

// calls myClass.doSomething() in this thread, but loop() executes it in the other
mySignal();