You could probably do the same with PeekMessage in win32, maybe call it periodically in a green threading library, or similar. But the most common mechanism is

You could probably do the same with PeekMessage in win32, maybe call it periodically in a green threading library, or similar. But the most common mechanism is an event loop. I'm sure people have developed X applications that talk the protocol directly, but it isn't the typical way to do it.