stackless, uthreads, and GUIs

[Neel Krishnaswami]

Johann Hibschman <johann at physics.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> 
> I was wondering if anyone has experimented with using stackless to
> implement guis.  I haven't played with the package much myself (yet),
> but it seems like you could write something nice using continuations
> to implement dialog boxes, and so on.
> 
> I know most real GUIs use threads, but real OS threads are such a PITA
> to get to compile (in my experience), that I'd like other options.
> 
> I'm mostly just playing with this idea for now.  Is it a reasonable
> direction in which to be thinking?  Any accessible references?

There is a paper describing precisely this idea called "Escaping the
Tyranny of the Event Loop: an Alternative Control Structure for
Multi-threaded GUIs," by Matthew Fuchs. You can find it at

  http://www.cs.nyu.edu/phd_students/fuchs/

You may also be interested in reading about Fudgets, a purely
functional GUI toolkit for Haskell. This one is a bit mind-blowing,
though:

  http://www.cs.chalmers.se/ComputingScience/Research/Functional/Fudgets/

Finally, there are a number of constraint-propagation GUI toolkits
out there, of which Amulet (a C++ toolkit, though apparently a Python
binding exists) and SCWM (http://scwm.mit.edu) are the most accessible.


Neel