[lcargill99]

Event driven is very likely more reliable. It's also less intuitive, up to a point. But event driven systems can be very nearly deterministic.

It's nice to see preemptive multitasking given yet another black eye. If you really are interested in determinism and throughput, event driven probably yields the best results. But much of that is design discipline - in my opinion, for high reliability, use cases by message sequence chart is certainly up there as a paradigm. It's much easier to audit for "correctness" ( and so long as you completely enumerate all preconditions, it gets asymptotically close to correct behavior ). One could do worse than a Rhapsody approach to design, even if you don't generate code from it.

This being said, I can see how threading might be a better choice for rich multiprocessor systems, if one can design a cache regime to take advantage of the location of state.