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

GUIs generally don't use a whole lot of threads, but they often do throw off another thread for interacting with certain sub-systems especially if those systems take awhile or are very shared resources.

For example, if you're going to print, you'll often want to throw off another thread to interact with the printer pool as it may be very busy for awhile and there's no reason not to keep working.

Another example would be database loads where you're interacting with SQL server or something like that and because of the latency involved you may want to create another thread so your main UI processing thread can continue to respond to commands.