[Lazarus] Threads and Libraries (dll and so)

[Reimar Grabowski]

On Tue, 4 Feb 2014 17:07:23 +0100 (CET)
Michael Van Canneyt <michael at freepascal.org> wrote:

> >> But this does not enable you to process the *information* displayed at such a speed.
> > As stated in my last mail the USAF and their pilots do not share your opinion.
> 
> Please... These people are primed for this kind of thing.
Irrelevant. If people can be trained to do such a thing the eyes and brains of humans are capable of doing it.
 
Even if you backpedal now (and in other mails, too), you started by stating that "there is no point whatsoever in updating the GUI more than 10 times per second: the human eye cannot process information faster than that".
You are right that it makes not much sense to update a GUI faster than that (I said that in my first mail already) but you are wrong that the eyes (and in some cases the brain) cannot process visual information faster.
Regarding GUI update times and threaded GUIs we were on the same side from the beginning. Looks like you did not read my first mail thoroughly enough.

All I wanted to make clear is that the human eye can process information faster than that and the brain can process the information faster than that, too. There are real world examples that it is beneficial for special software to update faster than 10 FPS (movies, games, etc.).

Pattern recognition (like in the aircraft example) is what the human eyes and brains are especially good at (and therefor fast). More complex tasks like reading (which is needed for your random number example and most GUIs) are quite a different beast.

Your reaction time examples don't add to the discussion as they involve much more than the eyes and brains visual processing speed.

> The point was simply that this relatively low speed does not warrant thread-aware GUIs.
I never argued with that, quite the opposite. Quoting my first mail: "I must admit that for a GUI 10 FPS is mostly enough. It is just that 1/10th of a second as the human eyes limit sounds way to low to me."

So eyes and brains can process faster than at 10Hz (simple tasks), but nonetheless multi threaded GUIs are nonsense. A single rendering thread is good enough for complex real time graphics at 60 FPS and beyond, so it is good enough for GUIs.

R.