After a very long (and necessary) break, I've started doing a bit of Teragon hacking again. I've picked up mostly where I left off, which is at TeragonGuiComponents. After making a release of PluginParameters with the new multi-threaded features, I have started updating the demo app in TeragonGuiComponents to use the new threadsafe API. I'm still finalizing the component API, but I have also introduced a common base class for components in the package which removes a lot of boilerplate and duplicate code.
After two evenings of work, I have got the demo app building and partially running with the multithreaded parameter sets! However, the key word here is "partially"; unfortunately components which share the same parameter "fight" to update the value, which is a sign that the parameter value is not being passed correctly to the components. Also I got a ghost crash which seems to have been spawned by the event dispatched thread, though the stacktrace doesn't indicate any traces of my own code, which is a bit odd.
Anyways, my goal for the evening was just to get everything updated and compiling again, so I haven't even started digging into debugging these problems. I don't think it will be so hard to fix these errors, but then again, everything involving multithreaded code tends to be a rabbit-hole of debugging. Let's hope that isn't the case this time. During the summer, I already put in the hard hours getting PluginParameters to be threadsafe, and once I reached the end of that journey I was 99% certain it was threadsafe, given the usage parameters which I defined in the documentation. If there are other race conditions or problems, it's likely not to be a simple one-liner fix in PluginParameters, so let's hope it doesn't come to that.
Also, on a frustrating sidenote, I fixed another compiler error in tinythread, only to discover that all of my previous pull requests on gitorious have remained unmerged. I guess I'm not terribly surprised, given that when I forked tinythread, I recall seeing at least one very ancient pull request sitting in the queue. However, I naively hoped that the author would take a look at my fixes/improvements and merge them in, but this hasn't been the case. If the author doesn't seem interested in maintaining this project, I'll likely move my fork from gitorious to github, since gitorious is a bit awkward to work with.