Hello Sascha,

Wednesday, March 17, 2004, 10:14:38 AM, you wrote:

SD> Lothar Scholz <mailinglists / scriptolutions.com> wrote:
>> SR> I don't know much about gui programming, and nothing about wxWidgets.
>> SR> Could you explain why native threads are so important?
>> 
>> They are important for programming but you are right, they are not
>> very important for GUI programming. Most GUI Toolkits are not really
>> multithread safe, some offer a few hooks, but they do this because
>> they don't support fibers (cooperative threads like ruby).

SD> Smalltalk dialects got around native threads in their GUIs for a very
SD> long time.

But now they must support it. There are to many important blocking
libraries they must use. Oracles DB driver has a non blocking
interface but AFAIK there is nothing for MySQL or Interbase
and i'm 100% that there is nothing like this for Sqllite.

SD> But Smalltalk GUIs are completely written in Smalltalk
SD> which has it's own lightweight process model. Ruby uses GUI toolkits
SD> written in C/C++. Those toolkits nearly always use nativ
SD> multithreading, don't they?

No, for example FOX is not multithreading safe. FLTK or TK have a
simple mutex for calling into the GUI code which 95% of all use cases
works, but not for the 5% of sophisticated ones.

-- 
Best regards,
 Lothar                            mailto:mailinglists / scriptolutions.com