[Python-Dev] Event loops, PyOS_InputHook, and Tkinter

[Michiel Jan Laurens de Hoon]

Guido van Rossum wrote:

>On 11/9/05, Michiel Jan Laurens de Hoon <mdehoon at c2b2.columbia.edu> wrote:
>  
>
>>My application doesn't need a toolkit at all. My problem is that because
>>of Tkinter being the standard Python toolkit, we cannot have a decent
>>event loop in Python. So this is the disadvantage I see in Tkinter.
>>    
>>
>
>That's a non-sequitur if I ever saw one. Who gave you that idea? There is no connection.
>
I have come to this conclusion after several years of maintaining a scientific plotting package and trying to set up an event loop for it. Whereas there are some solutions that more or less work, none of them work very well, and the solutions that we found tend to break. Other visualization packages are struggling with the same problem. I'm trying the best I can to explain in my other posts why I feel that Tkinter is the underlying reason, and why it would be difficult to solve.

>(If there's *any* reason for Python not having a standard event loop
>it's probably because I've never needed one.)
>
It's probably because we have gotten away with piggy-backing on Tcl's 
event loop for so long.

--Michiel.

-- 
Michiel de Hoon
Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Columbia University
1150 St Nicholas Avenue
New York, NY 10032