Best practice regarding number of threads in GUI applications

Question

In the past I\'ve worked with a number of programmers who have worked exclusively writing GUI applications.

And I\'ve been given the impression that they have almost

Answer 1

I've seen the same thing. Ideally you should perform any operation that is going to take longer then a few hundred ms in a background thread. Anything sorter than 100ms and a human probably wont notice the difference.

A lot of GUI programmers I've worked with in the past are scared of threads because they are "hard". In some GUI frameworks such as the Delphi VCL there are warnings about using the VCL from multiple threads, and this tends to scare some people (others take it as a challenge ;) )

One interesting example of multi-threaded GUI coding is the BeOS API. Every window in an application gets its own thread. From my experience this made BeOS apps feel more responsive, but it did make programming things a little more tricky. Fortunately since BeOS was designed to be multi-threaded by default there was a lot of stuff in the API to make things easier than on some other OSs I've used.