Re: Discouraging use of sync APIs

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Mon, 2015-02-09 at 13:42 +0000, Philip Withnall wrote:
> On Mon, 2015-02-09 at 14:02 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > On Mon, 2015-02-09 at 12:53 +0000, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> > <snip>
> > > I do agree with Philip's proposal of warning if the sync API is called
> > > inside the default main context, even if there's the obvious issue of
> > > console-only code that still uses a main loop, but does not have
> > > interactivity issues.
> >
> > I wouldn't want that. I can certainly see that as a necessary evil (say
> > on application startup), and would rather it threw an error if that sync
> > call took too long instead.
>
> Why can the startup code not use a GMainLoop? Is there some pattern I’ve
> missed? I thought in all such situations you could still do with a main
> loop so you could handle Ctrl+C nicely.

What's "handling Ctrl+C" nicely? I can Ctrl+C stuck applications fine in
most cases, and I wouldn't want the handling of such a feature to be the
main driver behind my API decisions.

On startup, you should try to get the maximum amount of work done in the
minimum amount of time. In some cases, pre-populating the UI (while
"blocking" the mainloop) is a better idea than seeing jarring effects
after the fact, once the UI has been loaded.