[webkit-gtk] webextensions, iframes and main gui process

[Michael Gratton]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 11:47 PM, Gaute Hope <eg at gaute.vetsj.com> wrote:
> Do you have any suggestions for how I could design or circumvent this?

Everything involving I/O that needs to be done on the main loop should 
be done asynchronously. That's precisely why GLib-based libs have such 
good support for async operations: To avoid blocking the GUI.

In particular for WebKitGTK, if the data you need to exchange between 
the GUI process and WebExtension can be trivially formatted and 
re-parsed (GVariant helps a lot with that), then consider using 
webkit_web_view_run_javascript() instead of your own custom protobuf 
IPC.

If the data you need to load from the GUI process is large enough, 
maybe consider registering a custom URI scheme handler using 
webkit_web_context_register_uri_scheme(), then let WebKitGTK handle 
getting the data to the WebProcess asynchronously for you.

If neither of those are a good fit, write an async protobuf wrapper 
using a background thread, so that when it blocks, it doesn't block the 
GUI as well.

Geary uses the first two of these approaches with WebKitGTK, and the 
last approach for interacting asynchronously with SQLite, and they all 
work quite well.

HTH,
//Mike

-- 
⊨ Michael Gratton, Percept Wrangler.
⚙ <http://mjog.vee.net/>