Sergey P. Derevyago wrote:
> John Nagle wrote:
> >     In particular, seldom is C++ GUI code written for a highly
concurrent
> > model.  Arguably, it should be, but for historical reasons, most
> > GUI systems are single-thread.
> >
>  Also there exist some good reasons to keep GUI single-threaded.
Please, take
> a look at "Multithreaded toolkits: A failed dream?"
> http://weblogs.java.net/blog/kgh/archive/2004/10/multithreaded_t.html
>  In particular: ...
I'm not sure this is terribly relevant to this discussion.  But if we
are talking about the needs for threads in general:

Isn't there an important distinction here between applications that
happen to have a GUI, and the GUI event processing per se?

I have very limited experience writing GUIs.  But I concluded a long
time ago that if you want to keep a responsive GUI while running tasks
that take an unbounded amount of time, you need either

a) A separate preemptively-scheduled thread in which to run the
long-running task, or
b) Something pretty ugly involving: Polling in the long running task,
or a separate process and inter-process-communication, or ...

Mozilla is certainly multithreaded.  I assume so is Internet Explorer.
Hans

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