Matt S Trentini <matt_trentini@yahoo.com.au> writes:
John Torjo wrote:
Could you elaborate a bit? What do you think is the window handle limit under win32?
I think that perhaps Mathew is talking about the GDI object limit. At least under Windows 2000 and earlier versions (I'm not sure about XP) there is a firm limit of 16K handles that can be allocated system wide - regardless of your particular specs (ie adding memory does not help). When this limit is reached weird stuff [1] happens which can only be fixed by a reboot.
Any object that allocates a handle under Windows (pens, brushes, dc's, etc) consume those resources and if you've got a graphically intense GUI using a greedy GUI library (ie one that holds it's handles for a long duration) that limit isn't too hard to break.
Yes, IIRC, that's why a spreadsheet implemented with a Window per cell will have a very small maximum size, and why ultimately, any robust window framework under Win32 has to have an abstraction layer that makes the issue of whether or not there's a real "windows window" running the show in any given pane disappear. I personally wouldn't be interested in any Win32 GUI framework that couldn't do that, and once you've done it, you're well along the way to a portable framework so you may as well design the abstraction to be independent of the Win32 API altogether. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting http://www.boost-consulting.com