Thread Blocking

#1 Hrm. Well, you could implement such a thing using the existing winThread.cc code.

Windows will let you signal a blocked thread (as will Linux pthreads, etc.).

I replaced the winThread.cc code with a cross-platform thread.cc that uses winPthreads on Windows, which seems to work pretty well. That allowed me to create a "Condition" class that does exactly as you describe.

Here's a code snippet that uses it:

if (mNumConnections == 0)
      {
         Con::debugf(ConsoleLogEntry::Communication, "waiting on active connections");
         mHaveConnections->wait(mMutex, haveActiveConnections);
         mMutex->unlock();
         Platform::sleep(50);
      }

mHaveConnections is a pointer to a Condition object. 'wait' blocks this thread until the condition is met.
(You can look at 'pthread_cond_wait' to get an idea of the implementation of it... wait ultimately calls 'pthread_cond_wait').

The condition here is 'haveActiveConnections', which is actually a function, which returns true when there are connections.