points by bob1029 2 days ago | 0 comments
You can blame reckless pursuit of multithreading for a lot of this. Most UIs should operate using only one thread. Communication between threads is unbelievably expensive if you don't actually need to do it. The multithreading thing turned into multiple computers and containers. It's all an extension of the same madness.
Until you can demonstrate to me that you can build an async/await server that uses a single core without deadlocking, I am not so sure you should be trusted with any additional resources.
[–] domador 2 days ago
Really? I thought the opposite was the case, that UIs don't use threads enough. For instance, the WhatsApp Windows desktop app often freezes while I'm trying to type a message, often losing much of what I type. It's not the only program that does. The part of the program that takes in keyboard input should never freeze because some other part of the program needs to load data somewhere else.
Maybe we're talking about different things, though.
on the contrary, native app UIs should at minimum separate the UI thread from background work, if only to keep UI controls responsive.
The UI thread may spend most of its time asleep, but it has to be available to instantly respond to user input (or events/signals from the OS)