[xmonad] Patch: Use threadWaitRead to avoid blocking in nextEvent in the main loop

[Adam Sampson]

Hi,

I've been playing around with Control.Concurrent lately, and ran into a
problem with xmonad as it stands: it usually blocks inside XNextEvent()
in the main loop, so the Haskell runtime system never gets a chance to
run any other lightweight threads.

The attached patch uses threadWaitRead to tell the runtime system to
wait for the X file descriptor to become ready before calling
XNextEvent. This works for me: I've now got a couple of forkIO threads
happily updating my status bar periodically.

I'm not entirely convinced it's correct, though. Is it possible for the
X server to send more than one event in a single communication? If so,
it would be necessary to call nextEvent to handle the subsequent events
before the file descriptor becomes ready again (which'd be easy if
there's a way to find out whether there are any events pending without
blocking).

Thanks,

-- 
Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org>                         <http://offog.org/>
-------------- next part --------------

New patches:

[Use threadWaitRead to avoid blocking in nextEvent in the main loop
Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org>**20080622002858
 
 This makes it possible to use lightweight threads (spawned using forkIO)
 in xmonad extensions; previously they wouldn't get a chance to run
 except when xmonad received an event.
] {
hunk ./XMonad/Main.hsc 25
+import Control.Concurrent
hunk ./XMonad/Main.hsc 140
-            forever_ $ handle =<< io (nextEvent dpy e >> getEvent e)
+            forever_ $ handle =<< io (do threadWaitRead (fromIntegral $ connectionNumber dpy)
+                                         nextEvent dpy e >> getEvent e)
}

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] 
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[TAG 0.7
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Patch bundle hash:
3957815c067466404d887a46bd7a3265df743da5