I have a system where my singleton class spawns a thread to do a calculation. If the user requests another calculation while another calculation is still running, I want it to tear down the existing thread and start a new one. But, it should wait for the first thread to exit completely before proceeding. I have all the tear down working but I seem to have an issue with making sure that only one thread runs. My approach is for the StartCalculation function to call mutex->Lock(). And the thread in the destructor releases the lock. It's not working. Am I right in assuming that if Lock() can't get the lock, it spins and keeps trying to reacquire the lock? Can this Lock() be called from my main application thread? Any ideas is helpful. Maybe wxMutex locks are the right mechanism for this.
To wait for a thread you need to create it joinable and simply use wxThread::Wait(). However I agree with the remark above: this is not something you'd normally do at all and definitely not from the main GUI thread as you should never block in it because this freezes the UI.
Consider using a message queue to simply tell the existing thread about the new task it needs to perform instead.