[ENet-discuss] Enet and multithreading

[David Anderson]

Hello,

I have recently discovered Enet and am planning to use it in a game 
engine instead of our current socket management layer. However, the 
engine is multithreaded, which brings up some questions relating to Enet.

I see in the archives that multithreading is somewhat a recurring topic, 
but I didn't find anyone with the exact kind of problem I think I may 
run into.

The network layer of the engine runs in its own thread for receiving 
data/new connections, and queues received packets in a Glib asynchronous 
queue (the glib way of communicating data between threads). Sending is 
done by another thread which calls a send function in the network module.

That is my first concern: with one thread looping on enet_host_service 
to manage incoming data, is it safe to call enet_peer_send or 
enet_host_broadcast from another thread? My instinct tells me that if 
there is no thread-safety within the lib this would be an extremely bad 
idea, but perhaps its structure would make this safe somehow?

My other concern is that I need to be able to notify the receiving 
thread that it should shut down. The only way I can see right now it to 
have enet_host_service timeout after some time, and check a boolean flag 
each time it times out and/or services events. My problem with that is 
that it'd be more efficient to have enet_host_service running with no 
timeout, and being able to 'signal' enet in some way to make 
enet_host_service return prematurely (with no event) only when I 
actually want to shut it down. Is this somehow possible?

Thanks in advance for any input on these questions,
David Anderson
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