David Zeuthen has posted the second installment in his series on best practices for low-level library development. “It is important for users of a library to know if calling a function involves doing synchronous I/O (also called blocking I/O). For example, an application with an user interface need to be responsive to user input and may even need to update the user interface every frame for smooth animations (e.g. 60 times a second). To avoid unresponsive applications and jerky animations, its UI thread must never call any functions that does any synchronous I/O.“
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