How to notify entities from different threads?

[JakkuSakura]

My app is multi-threaded tokio app, and I would like to notify the gpui when there's update. However, gpui::App is &mut, which I couldn't use in other threads.

How to notify entities from different threads?

[SomeoneToIgnore]

Update of what?

If there's a window that needs update, relatively costly way to do this is to call

zed/crates/gpui/src/app.rs

Lines 422 to 424 in f619d5f

	pub fn refresh_windows(&mut self) {
	self.pending_effects.push_back(Effect::RefreshWindows);
	}

If a particular entity had updated, one could carry Entity<Foo> around and do .update(cx, |_foo, cx| cx.notify()) on it.
E.g.

zed/crates/agent/src/active_thread.rs

Lines 1570 to 1574 in f619d5f

	cx.spawn(async move |this, cx| {
	report.await?;
	this.update(cx, |_this, cx| cx.notify())
	})
	.detach_and_log_err(cx);

Not sure how the latter is supposed to work with Tokio though.

[JakkuSakura]

Update of the entity to be the best. See my reply below

[JakkuSakura]

I managed to do it with this pattern:

let new = cx.new(move |_cx| AnyComponent::new(element));
let entity_id = new.entity_id();
let async_app = cx.to_async();
let func = move || {
    if let Err(err) = async_app.update(|cx| cx.notify(entity_id)) {
        error!("Failed to update entity: {}", err);
    }
};

then func can be passed around

[SomeoneToIgnore]

Nice.

To note on top, the only reason async state's .update can return an error is when the window is not present anymore — not sure if it's worth printing any "no window error" for such repaint tasks.