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Is there a way to use a existing Thread (especially the main Thread) for AWT windows. I am currently opening a Frame which then handles everything and the main Thread is just paused and waits for the window to close. For me this seems like a (not very devastating) waste of resources, so I would appreciate only using the main Thread for AWT. Is there a good reason why this isn't done and if not, is there a way to do it?

th3falc0n
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  • Why AWT rather than Swing? See my answer on [Swing extras over AWT](http://stackoverflow.com/a/6255978/418556) for many good reasons to abandon using AWT components. If you need to support older AWT based APIs, see [Mixing Heavyweight and Lightweight Components](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/java/mixing-components-433992.html). – Andrew Thompson Jan 09 '14 at 15:56
  • AWT because I just open a Frame for JOGL and don't have any GUI in it. GUI is manually drawn in OpenGL – th3falc0n Jan 09 '14 at 15:57

3 Answers3

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Just let the main thread exit, there is no need to keep it paused and waiting around.

Threads can be marked as Daemon or not. The application only exits when every non-daemon thread has exited, in Java the Main thread doesn't really have any special significance beyond the fact it is started first.

The EDT thread is not a Daemon thread so it will keep the application alive by itself.

What is Daemon thread in Java?

Community
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Tim B
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Based on this documentation http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/Thread.html

When a Java Virtual Machine starts up, there is usually a single non-daemon thread (which typically calls the method named main of some designated class). The Java Virtual Machine continues to execute threads until either of the following occurs:

The exit method of class Runtime has been called and the security manager has permitted the exit operation to take place. All threads that are not daemon threads have died, either by returning from the call to the run method or by throwing an exception that propagates beyond the run method.

moral of the story : 

A Java program will wait for all non-daemon threads to finish first.

In your case you might wanna exit the main thread.

Ashish
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One paused thread (if it's even actually paused) isn't really a big deal. I suggest looking at your program in something like JProfiler, you'll be shocked at what's going on in the background.

Kevin Workman
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