Can you draw UI stuff from a background Thread?

General JUCE discussion
1

I was trying an experiment to see if I could use a background thread to draw some UI things, and although it seems to work, I am seeing these strange purple warnings in Xcode like this:

-[NSView frame] must be used from main thread only
-[NSView window] must be used from main thread only

threads
threads1920×1027 139 KB

This is apparently a result of using calls like getBounds() in the code that is being drawn by the thread.

I did copy the basic approach from the multithreading demo, i.e. using a MessageManagerLock:

    void run() override
    {
        // this is the code that runs this thread - we'll loop continuously,
        // updating the coordinates of our blob.

        // threadShouldExit() returns true when the stopThread() method has been
        // called, so we should check it often, and exit as soon as it gets flagged.
        while (! threadShouldExit())
        {
            // sleep a bit so the threads don't all grind the CPU to a halt..
            wait (interval);

            // because this is a background thread, we mustn't do any UI work without
            // first grabbing a MessageManagerLock..
            const MessageManagerLock mml (Thread::getCurrentThread());

            if (! mml.lockWasGained())  // if something is trying to kill this job, the lock
                return;                 // will fail, in which case we'd better return..

            // now we've got the UI thread locked, we can mess about with the components
            moveBall();
        }

Is this not something that can or should be done?

2

You can’t do the actual rendering from the BG thread, but you can render into an image on a BG thread, and then pass this image back to the main thread for rendering.

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