How to make responsive GTK+ applications
Introduction This weekend I've made a GTK+ application, I've done my best to make it responsive by applying my old Android development experience. Android make it clear that you should not block UI thread (main thread) not non-UI tasks like: disk IO (read a file) network IO (request remote API) internal SQLite database intensive computations Let me quote : "You should not perform the work on the UI thread, but instead create a worker thread and do most of the work there." private class MyTask extends AsyncTask... { protected Long doInBackground(URL... urls) { // worker thread } protected void onProgressUpdate(Integer... progress) { // ui thread } protected void onPostExecute(Long result) { // ui thread } } GTK+ GTK+ is not threadsafe, in the sense all calls to GTK+ should be from a single thread that is the main thread or the UI thread, which seems similar to Android. We have a class that loads the glade XM