Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decvax!dartvax!eleazar!hugo
From: hugo@eleazar.Dartmouth.EDU (Peter Su)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Preemptive and Nonpreemptive Multitasking
Message-ID: <8466@eleazar.Dartmouth.EDU>
Date: 28 Mar 88 14:07:35 GMT
References: <8803171932.AA29989@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Reply-To: hugo@eleazar.Dartmouth.EDU (Peter Su)
Organization: Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Lines: 19

I think a point to consider is this:

The role of the operating system is to manage machine resources and allocate them
to the different tasks running on the system in a way that is transparent to the
programmer.  Thus, I don't think that the way Multifinder does task switching is
very clean or real.  True, most Mac application have to busy wait in a
GetNextEvent loop anyway, but that is just an artifact of bad design in the
beginning.  Busy waiting is ugly and uneeded.

So, my point is that I don't want to think about task switching at all when I'm
coding, I think that that sort of bookeeping is up to the OS to handle.

Pete

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