Bug 66962

Summary:	WebCore or WTF RunLoop abstraction
Product:	WebKit	Reporter:	Nat Duca <nduca>
Component:	WebCore Misc.	Assignee:	Nobody <webkit-unassigned>
Status:	ASSIGNED ---
Severity:	Normal	CC:	andersca, ap, dimich, enne, jamesr, jbates, levin, nduca, sam, skyul
Priority:	P2
Version:	528+ (Nightly build)
Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Unspecified

Description Nat Duca 2011-08-25 11:19:03 PDT

WK2 and Chromium both have embedder-specific abstractions for a thread that runs tasks, e.g.
- WebKit2/platform/RunLoop.h
- WebKit/chromium/public/WebThread.h

I'm wondering if we should have a generalized version of these abstractions available in WebCore.

Two systems that could be refactored to use this:
- WebCore/fileapi/FileThread
- WebCore/platform/chromium/CCThread

Are there other use cases? Should we actually do this?

Comment 1 Anders Carlsson 2011-08-26 10:45:35 PDT

(In reply to comment #0)
> WK2 and Chromium both have embedder-specific abstractions for a thread that runs tasks, e.g.
> - WebKit2/platform/RunLoop.h
> - WebKit/chromium/public/WebThread.h
> 
> I'm wondering if we should have a generalized version of these abstractions available in WebCore.
> 
> Two systems that could be refactored to use this:
> - WebCore/fileapi/FileThread
> - WebCore/platform/chromium/CCThread
> 
> Are there other use cases? Should we actually do this?

FWIW, the WebKit2 RunLoop class is just a platform abstraction for a system run loop. We also have a WorkQueue class which is a light-weight thread (on OS X it's actually a libdispatch queue) that can run tasks.

It would definitely be worth moving them down to either WebCore or even WTF.

Comment 2 Sam Weinig 2011-08-26 10:51:16 PDT

> It would definitely be worth moving them down to either WebCore or even WTF.

The tentative plan is to move them to WTF.

Comment 3 Nat Duca 2011-08-26 10:52:33 PDT

(In reply to comment #2)
> > It would definitely be worth moving them down to either WebCore or even WTF.
> 
> The tentative plan is to move them to WTF.


Cool. To ask a dumb question, can you have run loops for things != the main thread in the Wk2 abstraction?

Comment 4 Anders Carlsson 2011-08-26 10:53:35 PDT

(In reply to comment #3)
> (In reply to comment #2)
> > > It would definitely be worth moving them down to either WebCore or even WTF.
> > 
> > The tentative plan is to move them to WTF.
> 
> 
> Cool. To ask a dumb question, can you have run loops for things != the main thread in the Wk2 abstraction?

Yes, the run loop objects are allocated in thread-specific storage.

Comment 5 Nat Duca 2011-08-26 10:55:34 PDT

Awesome. That sounds like a great building block... is there a bug for that that I should merge this into?