Definitely went places. Sorry about that. Would make an excuse for it, but I don't really have one. Really slapped my dick right on the table there to no effect...

Ironically it's the floodfill of view() that I suspect would benefit least from parallelization. It's grabbing the map data that would probably work best in parallel. But the main thread would have to keep blocking till its peers finished; I don't see any other way to do that that wouldn't be a mess.

Ter13 wrote:

As for your other examples for crunching data in a threadworker, file loading, or icon manipulation, they aren't inherently problematic per se. File streaming, --> database queries <--, and icon operations would be pretty solid ideas for popping off into a threaded workflow.