Thanks! Regarding your first example, I'm not entirely sure I understand it. If you have a task that updates a progress bar as an infinite loop... does that mea

Thanks! Regarding your first example, I'm not entirely sure I understand it. If you have a task that updates a progress bar as an infinite loop... does that mean the task never finishes? What does "progress" even mean for something that goes on infinitely long? What happens if the GUI is destroyed in the middle of that thread's lifetime (which it will be by the main thread, if the secondary thread runs forever)? How many threads do/should you end up with if you later realize you want to run your program itself (i.e. your main()) function multiple times? The main cases I can think of where joining might not make sense is when you simply don't have the capability to do so in a reasonable manner, like when the main thread is in third-party code that you have no control over. Otherwise, if I understand the example correctly, you absolutely need to join such a thread - and not merely at program exit, but sometime before the GUI is destroyed.