hendelseskøer

Hendelseskøer, or event queues, are data structures used in event-driven software to store and manage events produced by various sources before they are processed by handlers. They help decouple the parts of a system that generate events from those that respond to them, enabling asynchronous and responsive behavior.

A typical hendelseskø contains event objects, each describing the event type, origin, timestamp, and any payload needed by the handler. Most køer operate on a first-in, first-out (FIFO) basis, ensuring events are processed in the order they were received. Some systems support multiple queues, priority levels, or different dispatch policies, which can influence the order and urgency of processing.

In practice, events are enqueued by producers such as user interfaces, timers, I/O operations, or inter-process communications, and dequeued by an event loop, dispatcher, or dedicated worker threads. GUI frameworks, operating system runtimes, and web browsers all rely on hendelseskøer to manage input, timers, rendering tasks, and background work. In browsers, for example, the event loop coordinates macrotasks and microtasks to schedule tasks in response to user actions and network events.

Key considerations when designing or using hendelseskøer include thread-safety, capacity limits and backpressure, ordering guarantees, and handling of overflow or dropped events. Some systems use simple FIFO queues; others implement ring buffers, prioritized queues, or multiple concurrent consumers to improve throughput. Proper tuning of queue size and processing rate helps maintain responsiveness while avoiding resource exhaustion.

See also: event-driven architecture, event loop, message queue, dispatcher.