[Inkscape-devel] Inkscape Thread Safety

Hi All,

I'm wondering how easy it would be to make the whole inkscape back-end thread safe, so that for example, SVGs can be parsed and rendered from within worker threads. Does anyone have any idea why it's not thread-safe already?

The reason I'm asking is because I've noticed a couple of scenarious such as PNG export, and quickly flicking between complex SVG files in the file dialogs, where the whole application locks up, in some cases for many minutes, with no way to cancel. Right now the renderer is required to run in the UI thread - even if it's a "headless" rendering such as in PNG export. That seems odd to me.

Any thoughts on this subject? Maybe I should add it as a blueprint in launchpad.

Thanks Joel