How to use threads with multiple windows in C++? - c++

Question

I'm trying to build an application that can spawn a window on a separate thread. Let me explain a simple version. My main creates an object that has a window, let's call this object a menu. From the menu you can select what to do, for example open up an image to a new window. This whole object, or the object's "game loop" needs to be on a separate thread so that I can still keep interacting with the menu. I also need to interact with the image viewer.
My question is, what is the proper way of doing this?
I haven't really used threads a lot before. But from what I understand I need to detach the thread to create a daemon thread.
I tried to play around with the thread to create this but I kept getting these errors:
Failed to activate the window's context
Failed to activate OpenGL context: The requested resource is in use.
I'm not certain what causes this, all objects, like my windows are different instances. The application will still run fine even with these errors.
My application is quite big so here's an extremely simplified version of the code I've tried.
int main()
{
Menu menu; // this spawns a window
menu.run(); // let's say for simplicity this doesn't do anything else other than
// create a new window (the image viewer)
}
...
void caller(Image_view *img_view)
{
img_view->run();
}
void Menu::run()
{
Image_view *img_view = new Image_view(); // This creates the window
this->thread = new std::thread(caller, img_view);
this->thread->detach();
while (1); // This is here to keep the application running,
// in a real application this method would look different.
// This whole thread call would be in an event handler instead,
// but for this example I tried to make it as simple as possible
}
...
void Image_view::run()
{
while (running)
{
update(); // Event handler and whatever
render(); // Renders the image and whatever
}
this->window->close();
}
I mostly want to know if I'm using the thread correctly or not in an application like this. Also if you have any insight as to what the error message means, explaining it would be greatly appreciated. I should also mention that I'm using SFML for rendering and creating the window instance.
The tutorials I found about the threads are always something extremely simple which doesn't involve any window or anything that could for example cause that error message. So I figured someone smarter here might know the proper use of the thread in my case.
Thanks in advance!