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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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Programming
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The part you're missing entirely is the complexity that's hidden behind the weasel word "most".
The majority of event handlers from a GUI app do not do anything complex, computationally expensive, or blocking. They do things like setting flags, trigger changes in the UI state (i.e., show/hide/update widgets) bump counters, etc.
No one in their right mind would ever consider going through the trouble of doing this stuff in separate threads/processes. "Most" handlers run perfectly fine on the main thread.
Nevertheless software changes, and today's onClick handler that sets a flag to true/false tomorrow is required to emit a metric event or switch a different treatment depending on the state of a feature flag or A/B test, or is required to write a setting to disk or something like that.
How do you draw the line in the sand that tells whether this handler should run on the main thread, should trigger a fire-and-forget background task, or should be covered by a dedicated userflow with a complete story board?
That's the stuff that's hand-waved away with weasel words like "most".
This blog post delivers a crisp mental model to tell which approach is suitable: follow the real time computing rulebook, acknowledge that each and every handler has a time budget, and if a handler overspends it's budget them it needs to be refactored.