[Lazarus] What to replace Application.Processmessages with?

[Bo Berglund]

On Tue, 27 Oct 2020 21:25:55 +0000, Graeme Geldenhuys via lazarus
<lazarus at lists.lazarus-ide.org> wrote:

>In the long term I would highly suggest converting that code / tasks
>to multiple theads. From what you described, they sound like good
>candidates for a thread based system.

Yes, I agree, but...

The code is pretty big and very hard to follow these many years since
it was created...

I wanted to get it running first with as small changes as possible and
I thought I had that nailed until I started an actual execution on the
hardware and found that I could set it up properly and start it but
then nothing more is happening.
So there are probably other places where events are important, I
guess, and I have to track down these as well...

I am now thinking of creating some kind of general purpose thread
object in order to track progress on the hardware but without doing
much else, because the timer event was there in order to detatch the
task execution from the body of the program so that it could run other
things meanwhile. Some tasks take hours to execute...
But initializing a run takes only some seconds so that could remain in
mainline code if only the progress monitoring is handled in the
thread.

Of course I have to communicate the state of affairs to mainline from
the thread...
Could be done by changing boolean variable states (I assume a boolean
which is just a single bit should be inherently thread-safe).

Or else having an event in the thread to message into the mainline
code using Synchronize().


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden