Mastering Perl/Tk

Coexisting with Other GUI Main Loops

It’s perfectly possible to have more than one GUI main loop running concurrently. It’s a simple matter of cooperation and balance. By balance, we mean how the events are portioned out. It’s very easy for one main loop to “take control” and “starve” the other loop of processing time. In this section, we’ll demonstrate how to use both OpenGL and Tk widgets in the same application. We’ve found that, generally, to keep Tk events flowing, it’s sufficient to call update once in a while. If update starves OpenGL, we fall back to DoOneEvent.

DoOneEvent allows us to fine tune a Tk event loop by processing only selected events, which we specify by bit pattern. We can inclusively OR the following symbols together and define the desired bit pattern: WINDOW_EVENTS, FILE_EVENTS, TIMER_EVENTS, and IDLE_EVENTS. To specify all possible events, use ALL_EVENTS, and to make the DoOneEvent call nonblocking, add DONT_WAIT.

When passed ALL_EVENTS, DoOneEvent processes events as they arise and puts the application to sleep when no further events are outstanding. DoOneEvent first looks for a window or I/O event and, if found, calls the handler and returns. If there is no window or I/O event, it looks for a single timer event, invokes the callback, and returns. If no window, I/O, or timer event is ready, all pending idle callbacks are executed, if any. In all cases, DoOneEvent returns 1.

When passed DONT_WAIT, DoOneEvent works as described, except that, if there ...