Threads and cmsThreadID

One of the things lcms 2 is different to lcms is multithreading support. That is, indeed, a difficult feature. One may argue that just avoiding global variables should be enough to support multiple threads, but I think this is not necessarily true. Sometimes some global settings have to apply to all threads. On the other hand, it would be desirable for error handling and memory allocation to have some clues on which are the thread currently active or the environment where the current operation takes place.

So the solution I've found is the cmsThreadID type. That is just a void pointer.

Most of the high-level functions in lcms2 does have two forms. The first one is defaulting the ThreadID parameter to zero, which means "user don't care about threads". The second form allows to specify the ThreadID. This ID will be passed to memory allocation, error handler and plug-ins, so the user code may be smart enough to react differently on different threads. One example is to use different memory pools, which is useful, among others, when a given thread crashes and you want to recover gracefully.

Related functions :

cmsThreadID cmsGetProfileThreadID()
cmsThreadID cmsGetTransformThreadID()

And all functions with THR ending the function name, for example:

cmsHPROFILE cmsCreateRGBProfileTHR();