[Development] Incorporating Intel Threading Building Blocks into Qt? (Was: Evolving Qt's multithreading API)

[Sze Howe Koh]

On 4 March 2013 20:41, Olivier Goffart <olivier at woboq.com> wrote:
> What exactly do you want to use TBB for?
>
> Can we not just suggest users to use TBB directly? And just make sure Qt play
> nice with it.
>
> Or do you want to make a wrapper library to qt-ify it? What exactly do you
> want to qt-ify? Is it only the underscores and naming conventions or is there
> more to do?
>
> Or do you think Qt could use TBB for implementing some of the algorithms
> within the Qt library?

The idea was to bring high-level multithreading functionality (e.g.
task scheduling, algorithms, thread-safe containers) into Qt, by
putting a wrapper around a 3rd-party library instead of inventing it
all ourselves. But yes, making Qt play nice with said library would
involve even less work than wrapping it. I'd imagine that Qt-fication
would involve not just naming conventions, but also signal/slot
support, integrating their algorithms with Qt containers, and hiding
modules that are redundant in Qt (e.g. their own mutexes).

I don't have a strong vision for it myself. It was something that
Thiago indicated interest in before
(http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2012-November/007901.html),
so while I was on the topic of revamping Qt's multithreading API, I
included this in the list-of-things-to-explore.

A different possibility we could look at is absorbing ThreadWeaver
upstream, perhaps?


Regards,
Sze-Howe