How does the message queue work in Win32?

Question

I read some stuff on Win32 and how the message loop works, and there\'s something that is still unclear to me: What exactly is stored in the message queue? The integer value

Answer 1

The message queue in Windows is an abstraction. Very helpful to think of it as a queue but the actual implementation of it is far more detailed. There are four distinct sources of messages in Windows:

• Messages that are delivered by SendMessage(). Windows directly calls the window procedure, the message isn't returned by Peek/GetMessage() but does require a call to that function to get dispatched. By far the most messages are delivered this way. WM_COMMAND is like that, it is directly sent by the code that translates a key-down event, like TranslateAccelerator(). No queue-like behavior.

• Messages that are synthesized from the window state. Best examples are WM_PAINT, delivered when the "window has a dirty rectangle" state flag is set. And WM_TIMER, delivered when the "timer has expired" state flag is set. These are 'low priority' messages, only delivered when the message queue is empty. They are delivered by GetMessage() but do not otherwise live on the queue.

• Input event messages for the keyboard and mouse. These are the messages that truly have queue-like behavior. For the keyboard this ensures that type-ahead works, no keystroke gets lost when the program isn't ready to accept a keystroke. A bunch of state is associated with it, the entire state of the keyboard gets copied for example. Roughly the same for the mouse except that there's less state. The WM_MOUSEMOVE message is an interesting corner case, the queue does not store every single pixel traversed by the cursor. Position changes are accumulated into a single message, stored or delivered when necessary.

• Messages stored in the queue by an explicit PostMessage() call. That's entirely up to the program code, clearly it only needs to store the arguments of the call plus the time the call was made so it can accurately be replayed back at GetMessage() time.