Allegro 5 separate process for rendering

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Motivation for using separate processes for rendering is if you wish to have multiple threads rendering. I do a lot of set blending type, put pixels, set blender type again, more pixels, etc. If I use async() to render multiple images at once these function calls might interfere as race conditions.

Probably a noobish moment, but I never realized the "stack" was this limited. I tried declaring something like

struct structw800h600
{
    ...
    Pixels pixels[800 * 600].
};

message_queue mq (create_only, "pixels",
    1, //max message number
    sizeof(structw800h600)); //max message size

structw800h600 img;
memset(&img, 0x00, sizeof(structw800h600));

This code caused an exception while constructing the object that declared an instance of the struct on the stack:

Unhandled exception at 0x003E5017 in Starcry.exe: 0xC00000FD: Stack overflow (parameters: 0x00000000, 0x00702000).

Shows break here in chkstk.asm (because I am in debug mode):

[...]
; Find next lower page and probe
cs20:
        sub     eax, _PAGESIZE_         ; decrease by PAGESIZE
        test    dword ptr [eax],eax     ; probe page. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< here
        jmp     short cs10

_chkstk endp

        end

I did not find out the exact threshold but the the crash occured when the size of the struct was above ~1024972 bytes or ~1000 kB. (Size of each pixel object is 16 byte). If I understand it correctly the stack is only several MB so I was simply storing too much data on it.

Still posting this because I almost jumped to the false conclusion that it was a windows platform shared memory limitation. Simply allocate the Pixel objects from the free-store and send that through the message queue. Something like: Pixel *pixels = new Pixel[800 * 600];