How would you implement a basic event-loop?

If you have worked with gui toolkits, you know that there is a event-loop/main-loop that should be executed after everything is done, and that will keep the application alive and responsive to different events. For example, for Qt, you would do this in main():

int main() {
    QApplication app(argc, argv);
    // init code
    return app.exec();
}

Which in this case, app.exec() is the application's main-loop.

The obvious way to implement this kind of loop would be:

void exec() {
    while (1) {
        process_events(); // create a thread for each new event (possibly?)
    }
}

But this caps the CPU to 100% and is practicaly useless. Now, how can I implement such an event loop that is responsive without eating the CPU altogether?

Answers are appreciated in Python and/or C++. Thanks.

Footnote: For the sake of learning, I will implement my own signals/slots, and I would use those to generate custom events (e.g. go_forward_event(steps)). But if you know how I can use system events manually, I would like to know about that too.

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1 Answer

Python:

You can look at the implementation of the Twisted reactor which is probably the best implementation for an event loop in python. Reactors in Twisted are implementations of an interface and you can specify a type reactor to run: select, epoll, kqueue (all based on a c api using those system calls), there are also reactors based on the QT and GTK toolkits.

A simple implementation would be to use select:

#echo server that accepts multiple client connections without forking threads

import select
import socket
import sys

host = ''
port = 50000
backlog = 5
size = 1024
server = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
server.bind((host,port))
server.listen(backlog)
input = [server,sys.stdin]
running = 1

#the eventloop running
while running:
    inputready,outputready,exceptready = select.select(input,[],[])

    for s in inputready:

        if s == server:
            # handle the server socket
            client, address = server.accept()
            input.append(client)

        elif s == sys.stdin:
            # handle standard input
            junk = sys.stdin.readline()
            running = 0

        else:
            # handle all other sockets
            data = s.recv(size)
            if data:
                s.send(data)
            else:
                s.close()
                input.remove(s)
server.close()

answered 2009-03-19T01:45:14.093

How would you implement a basic event-loop?

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