I'm wondering if there is an easy way to create a single extra thread that one can pass delegates(code) to and it executes it properly. The thread never closes except at shutdown.

The idea is that isn't of creating one thread per task, there is one thread that executes each task.

Obviously the idea is not hard but I'd like to wrap those tasks up in lamdas so I can instantiate them at the point I need them(and possibly even reuse them). I don't wanna stick all the code in one thread with a giant switch nor create multiple threads.

The main problem is that each delegate might have different arguments and return values associate with it and, while templates probably can handle it, it seems like it could be a mess.

Any ideas how to accomplish this effectively? The main thread will effectively be a task scheduler that will will be able to execute tasks sequentially and in parallel and interrupt with interval execution(probably using fibers to do so).


An easy way to think about this is for animations. We might want to animate several things at the same time at different rates. So each task will do the frame of the animation then yield. The scheduler does it's job and sequences everything so it all comes out correctly(each animation frame is rendered as soon as it is suppose to. If it's a 30fps second animation then the scheduler tries to call the task 30 times a second. If it's 1fps then it does so once a second... interleaving everything etc.


e.g.,

int N = 100;
scheduler.AddTask((int N) { for(int i = 0; i < N; i++) { displayImage("Animation", i); yeild; } }, 100, N); // Display the ith frame of animation at 10fps.

Or whatever.

Essentially the scheduler should do nothing until a task is added, schedule them as it should, etc.

Now, the hard thing, I think is that the delegates should capture the local context, but they are ran on a different thread so any local values are passed along... which requires templates since they might be different for each delegate: e.g.


Event e = widgetEvent;
scheduler.AddTask((Event e) { for(int i = 0; i < e.Count; i++) { AddEventCycles(e.Cycle[i]); yield; } }, 10, e);


and I think that is probably the hard part since we need to store the delegates in a heterogeneous container of delegates.

Anyways, Would be nice if something like this already existed or would be easy to implement.