[Chicago] desktop development

Bryan Oakley bryan.oakley at gmail.com
Sat Dec 4 02:20:07 CET 2010


On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 6:02 PM, Tal Liron <tal.liron at threecrickets.com> wrote:
> For anything but the most
> trivial desktop app, you'll want to do multithreading, ...

I have a hard time believing that. I've got similar experience to
yours (20ish years non-trivial commercial desktop GUI development in
many languages and platforms) and only rarely have I ever needed
multithreading. In fact, the only time I've really needed
multithreading is for toolkits that more-or-less require it. The last
commercial app I worked on was multi-threaded, and when I stripped
that out the code was considerably less complex and ran faster.

Now, multi-*processing*, that's another story. My GUIs almost always
spawn external processes to get work done.

So yeah, you can use threads but they are far from being a given in my
experience.

(that being said, my current project has three threads -- one for the
GUI, one for a built-in jabber client, and one for a built-in xmlrpc
server. If I were using Tcl instead of Python, though, I probably
would only need one thread <shrug>)


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