From: Ben Tilly <ben_tilly@...>
Date: 2001-02-13T03:24:14+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:10737] Re: Threading model change, proposal

Andrew Kuchling <akuchlin@mems-exchange.org> wrote:
>
>"Ben Tilly" <ben_tilly@hotmail.com> writes:
> > I suspect that the most common appliation for threading is
> > to allow a GUI to be responsive even when the program is
> > busy doing something else.
>
>But note that most GUI toolkits implement an event loop internally,
>and CPU-heavy computations needs to take this into account in order to
>work smoothly.  Having a fine-threaded scripting language won't help
>if your GUI has a global lock of its own.  Quoting from documentation
>for various toolkits:
[...]
>So most GUI toolkits impose their own serialization, apparently
>similar to having a global lock.

I think we are talking past each other.  It makes perfect
sense for the GUI toolkit to serialize various internal
operations.  However what is frustrating is to (for
instance) push a button that launches a possibly long
database request in the background and then have your
screen freeze.  Or to be unable to break off a web page
request.

Multi-threading with real threads is valuable, and can
work just fine even if only one thread talks to the GUI.

Cheers,
Ben
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