[JoeAltmaier]

Agreed, sort of. The problem is, the wrong problem is addressed by operating systems.

What you may mean by "the highest-priority work (updating the UI)" is really "the lowest-latency work". What we perceive as UI quality is the latency of sucessive events - is it smooth, and fast.

But OSs only give us a big hammer to manage this - priority of threads. Which is very indirectly related to latency. E.g. priority inversion, blocking i/o, the stupid habit of putting OS threads strictly ahead of user threads, and on and on, all impact latency in a way the programmer cannot constrain.

Experimental OSs have tried to use latency as the fundnamental scheduling metric. But each time a new mainstream OS is released, lo and behold it's based on stupid old priority.

So let's acknowledge the fundamental fact, that we're not being given the tools to achieve what we need, and everything we do is a workaround that's more or less successful. It all glitches under the right (wrong) conditions, all approaches are hacks of one sort or another.