Keeping GUIs responsive during long-running tasks

Question

Keeping the GUI responsive while the application does some CPU-heavy processing is one of the challenges of effective GUI programming.

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Answer 1

This answer doesn't apply to the OP's question regarding Python, but is more of a meta-response.

The easy way is threads. However, not every platform has pre-emptive threading (e.g. BREW, some other embedded systems) If possibly, simply chunk the work and do it in the IDLE event handler.

Another problem with using threads in BREW is that it doesn't clean up C++ stack objects, so it's way too easy to leak memory if you simply kill the thread.