[fpc-pascal] Running a background process

[Peter Vreman]

> Hi,
>
> As I mentioned in my previous post I would like to develop a text based
> application... possibly with a text based gui.
>
> I have one little problem.
>
> I would like the program to do stuff while it waits for user input. Let's
> call "do stuff" the "background process".
>
> In a windows console program this would be really easy. I would simply use
> writeln and readln etc to read commands etc and display stuff etc... and
> use
> a second Tthread to do the background stuff.

TTHread is supported

> But after I developed the text based application I want to build it to all
> other targets...
>
> For now dos, linux and windows will do... but later maybe also beos and
> amiga... I was hoping that free pascal could also target C64 ! That would
> be
> super cool =D
>
> Anyway...
>
> The problem is a little bit with readln and readkey etc...
>
> Readln will simply block the process etc. Dos doesn't have multi threaded
> support ???

It has no multithread support


> I could do it as follows:
>
> while running do
> begin
>     if KeyPressed then
>     begin
>         ReadLn(Command);
>     end;
>
>     BackgroundProcess.SingleLoop; // ;) etc
> end;
>
> So far this seems the most easy and best solution
>
> BUT
>
> While the user is typing a command the whole program will freeze etc...
>
> That's a bit unfortunate. I would like the background process singleloop
> to
> continue while the user enters his commands etc...
>
> Euhm any solutions ?
>
> Well I have thought of one solution and that's the CLX thing... or Turbo
> Vision thing... it's a text based gui... and if I am not mistaken it also
> has some sort of Idle Loop etc...

Free Vision is available


> That's why I mentioned CLX in my previous post.
>
> Well maybe somebody in this mailing list found a nice trick for console
> application in dos with background processess ? which is even target
> independant or something ?
>
> I have seen DWPL and it's stack use some sort of Multi Threading in Dos
> etc... but I don't know if it's cross platform and stable etc.. probably
> not
> ;)

CLX is Windows/Linux only and not made with the idea of being cross
platform at all. For example no MacOSX or AMD64 (64bit) support.